Forum OpenACS Q&A: Anyone interested in cheap oACS hosting? Might be rolling my own...

Background: I've got 5 low-traffic sites running on ISDN, which is great for the dynamic IP. There's definitely a pause before you get the first page, and occasionally my ISDN or router hangs in mid- day and there's nothing I can do for hours. Fine for little fun sites with zero budget, but sub optimal, and then there's that whole bandwidth thing... Dial-up users don't notice it, but you can bet the folks with DSL or better do. I've about given up on getting my campus to take http://www.labarchive.net, so it lives under my desk and suffers the same outages that all the others do. And then there's http://www.egyptbay.com, which could see a LOT of traffic if the MMPORG involved (currently in beta) goes live. But what finally got me really going on this was wanting to get my church's website going using openACS, on something resembling their budget. And their budget is tiny.

Sometimes you don't have to look much further than your own ISP. Turns out my ISDN provider has a decent colo plan, which I can afford IF I can find a few folks interested in sharing a BSD box. You'd get a few GB of disk space, a couple GB a month of transfer, but near- zero tech support from me. It'd be my job to keep the server up, but it would be your job to do nearly everything else, in your very own jail. (I'd provide a vanilla AOLserver, oACS, and PostgreSQL install.) It looks like I can do this in the $50/month (USD) price range. (NOTE: Price is EXTREMELY approximate.) You'd get a good deal on bandwidth and disk space, but you'd mostly be on your own.

So here's the question: Is anyone interested? Obviously, at that price, I'm not going to get rich, but I might break even . And then there'd be more oACS hosting for us little folks on tiny budgets who can't get DSL.

Post or send email if interested. Or if you'd like to tell me the huge flaws in this plan, you could go ahead and post those here, too. ;)

Caltek.net has researched and identified arts, technology, and educational resrouces. Right now, we need to implement the openacs educational system to house, organize, and make these resources available in an elearning-intranet-environment. We will invite the ctcnets of California and a few other community, affiliate type organizations to assess and share in the benefits of using open source where appropriate, including in the types of training programs, they offer. This will further add to the shared educational resources available to all of us in the openacs educational system.

So, yes we (all two of us) are interested in inexspensive domain hosting for development of an openacs community system. Right now we are limping along with a situation where we have worked with a lowbandwith provider where we have ssh setup but because of security we can't restart the aolserver (which has been down, now for over 2 weeks while the sysop is on vacation)

Also, we would like to use the 4.5 because it has key modules that we need to use. Also, our current situation has the 3.xxx running rh 6.2.

We would love to have a conversation about setting up a development site that could grow and scale as needed. Our funds are limited to out of pocket right now, but we do have a concept for how to service non-profits and other community organizations with a combination of the existing openacs modules coupled with customized db back forms and a volunteer management system which we all can use.

While $25/mo sounds good we could commit to $20/mo or less and would want to physically come and setup our account at the hosting site. We would also round up more accounts for hosting, onces we get setup, ourselves.

sincerely,

Hi Cathy,

We are hopefull that several things will happen this summer.
1. Several grants will be submitted for hosting/colo, programming, hardware, and the development of webbased, training boot camps combining A+, linux, and openacs.
2. That I successfully align the learn & earn computer refurbishing curriculum with the A+ standardized program and have it sequentially presented, mostly if not all in html and pdf formats. My test ground is the M-Th, 3-7 computer refurbishing project with youth at Operation YES in Boyle Heights that I started doing 1 July, this week.
3. That I spend 10-15 hours/week promoting Dr. Randal Pinkett's oacs - C3 - $10k/year turnkey hosting situation that is being used in low to moderate community housing neighborhoods.
4. Spend 10-15 hours/week learning to install, configure, and customize linux in conjunction with the caltek.net plan for using the oacs (aolserver, postgresql, and tcl.)
5. That by the end of summer that we can invite the ctcnets in California and other affiliate groups to test and demo our own oacs community site.

So, after looking through the information, I found on you, I think it would be appropriate to dialog further about what each of us are upto and how we might find, some things, in common, that could benefit our communities, if we were to collaborate, in specific ways.

When I sent this message, yesterday I noticed that there are close to 100 people that are alerted to this posting. Is it appropriate for us to have this conversation, here in public or should we take it offline? Actually, there might not be much more to it (this conversation), if you do not think we have something more to talk about.

I'm sure you will let me know....thanks.