One of the barriers to adoption for dotLRN and OACS is installalation. If a new person gets curious and considers taking a quick test drive they might not want to go through the effort of installing AOLServer and Postgres etc.
I've noticed recently that some companies are offering OACS hosting service, fully installed, for numbers like $20 a month plus $20 set up fee. I think a lot of employees at universities or companies who would like to check out OACS or dotLRN might well rather spend $40 to $50 bucks rather then the time to set up a test server. But put yourself in the chair of some average programmer who had never heard of OACS. He is browsing the dotLRN website and deciding he wants to try it out. He can easily find instructions for downloading and installation, but it's unlikely he would ever realize he could skip it all for less then $50.
I propose we make a page like https://openacs.org/community/companies/ with links just to companies that provide "instant gratification OACS and/or dotLRN hosting" and link it from the companies page and a couple pages in the installation and download docs so people can find it.
This is not to say we still don't need to improve our installation docs and tools. It's just a way to support some newbies who are not that cost sensitive and also, I think its a good way for the community to support the companies who are doing a service by providing OACS hosting at very reasonable prices.
