Forum OpenACS Q&A: hosting without damaging your wallet?

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1: hosting without damaging your wallet?
Posted by Mike Cahn on 11/27/00 08:59 PM
In searching for a cheap hosting company I've come across
http://www.maximpact.net/virtualpage.htm, who say they have Tcl,
PostgreSQL, Full Shell account and Full Unix Development
environment.  Funny they don't seem to specify the web server
software.

I'm a developer so am not concerned about the learning curve, though
I'm not a Unix head (yet).  Don't know some basics yet because can't
install anything till I have a box (I've read Philip's Book).  So is
the above enough or must I have AOLServer or something else?  I'm not
worried about huge traffic - if I get it I'll pay the big bucks for a
dedicated box somewhere.  I just want a little space to play around
in. 😉
If anyone might share their experience with this or other hosting
companies, would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Mike

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2: Response to hosting without damaging your wallet? (response to 1)
Posted by Robert Schlaff on 11/27/00 10:17 PM
I'm in a similar boat. For now I'm going to host my site off my DSL line at home (if it ever get's installed).

But it's also pretty cheap to rent a server from someone else. My friend is doing it for $150 a month but I'm not sure about the name of the company.

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3: Response to hosting without damaging your wallet? (response to 1)
Posted by Mike Cahn on 11/27/00 10:26 PM
I wish DSL was an option but I live in Wicklow Town (south of Dublin) [Dublin, *Ireland* that is] and DSL hasn't made it out here yet.

I found a recent thread here from Unmesh Laddha who offered this at $100 per month if he got at least 10 people; less if more joined up.

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4: Response to hosting without damaging your wallet? (response to 1)
Posted by Mark S on 11/27/00 11:40 PM

I'm using Dell's hosting service. Their PowerApp 100 is $199 per month and they give you a 10% discount if you can pay for a year up front. They market the PowerApps as just for serving static content, but I'm running OpenACS on it just fine.

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5: Response to hosting without damaging your wallet? (response to 1)
Posted by Mike Cahn on 11/28/00 08:11 AM
Had a look at Dell's offering.  It looks like remote access and backup both are additional costs - is that right?
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6: Response to hosting without damaging your wallet? (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 11/28/00 11:22 AM
vhosting.com gives you a dedicated server for $119/month.

I haven't looked into it any further though. They don't have alot of options on their web site, you have to email them for more information. Right now I am running 4 sites on my DSL connection, but they are not very busy at all.

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7: Response to hosting without damaging your wallet? (response to 1)
Posted by Mark S on 11/28/00 02:13 PM
Dell charges extra to install PcAnywhere on an NT box, but you can get remote access to Linux just fine with no additional fee.  The backups require an extra fee.
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8: Response to hosting without damaging your wallet? (response to 1)
Posted by Louis Gabriel on 11/28/00 05:42 PM
Question for Mr. Shead:

What's the URL of your site on the PowerApp? I always enjoy seeing the sites of folks who post here!

Thanks! And have a GREAT day :o)

Louis

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9: Response to hosting without damaging your wallet? (response to 1)
Posted by Mark S on 11/28/00 08:46 PM
The site I'm running is at eMenOfGod.com. It is being used as an online scrapbook for two wings at Oral Roberts University.
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10: Response to hosting without damaging your wallet? (response to 1)
Posted by Mike Sisk on 11/29/00 03:36 AM
Funny you should ask;  we're literally within days of rolling out our
(furfly) OpenACS hosting service.

If you sign up, you will get a full shell account (via secure shell),
ftp, DNS, as many mail aliases as you want (controlled yourself
via .qmail files), AOLserver, Postgres, etc. We won't install the
ACS for you, but we'll make the tarball available (it's not
necessary to use OpenACS to use our service).  You'll get a
resonable amount of disk space and bandwidth (yet to be exactly
pinned down but probably 100 MB disk and 1GB/month transfer).
The hardware is Dell 2450's (same as we use for our other ACS
customers) on Linux and hosted at Exodus.

Price will be $100 a month during development, $200 a month
after going "live"., with a $500 setup fee and a $200 "launch" fee

We'll announce it here when it's ready and/or you can check out
http://openacs.furfly.net for details.  The site is up now, but is not
complete yet.

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11: Re: Furfly Hosting (response to 1)
Posted by Carl Coryell-Martin on 11/29/00 04:25 AM
That sounds great.  I have a customer that would be perfect for.  Do you do any kind of backup of the 100 Mb.
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12: Re: Furfly Hosting (response to 1)
Posted by Mike Sisk on 11/29/00 01:19 PM
We do nightly dumps to an IDE array and occasional dumps to
tape. A pgdump will also be done nightly and placed in the users
home directory.

However, we strongly recommend folks do their own backups.
Our backups are meant as a means of bare-metal recovery
should the system need it. There will be an hourly charge if you
need us to get something from the dumps.

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13: Response to hosting without damaging your wallet? (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 11/29/00 02:09 PM
For backing up check out Backup Tips... in the OpenACS documentation.

This has sample scripts on how to dump the database and FTP it to a remote site. From there it can be backed up onto any media you choose.

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14: Response to hosting without damaging your wallet? (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 11/29/00 02:47 PM
Furfly will be making the dumps nightly into your home directory, using something similar to that script I wrote that you've pointed folks for.  So all you'll have to do is ftp the nightly backups elsewhere if you want an offsite backup under your control.  Another hack of the same script could just do the ftp without the dump, since you'll already have the dump available.
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15: Response to hosting without damaging your wallet? (response to 1)
Posted by Brett Bourne on 11/30/00 02:01 PM
We (segNET) offer what we consider to be very aggressively priced hosting, but we're not offering virtual hosting for OpenACS projects just yet (we're looking into this) as AOLServer does not support this, at least not as well as Apache does.

Our model is essentially to build a service to spec, and our location, size and dedication to OpenACS and ACS developers (among others) allows us to be substantially less than the "big boys" (Exodus, RackSpace, etc.) while - we think - matching their QOS.

Plus we're open to suggestions, if there are a couple of folks looking for a shared resource, maybe we can build it for you.