Well, I've a small web hosting company (at side of my software development (also small) company) and I've evaluated several times about offering Squeak-Seaside hosting but, unfortunately, to my profile of customers (smalls) the ecuation don't close.

I've mainly customers with statics or small dynamic MySQL-PHP or Perl sites and in a server were I can host 200 of this sites, the number down too much considerating memory and another Squeak requirements. Virtual server may be an alternative, but very expensive yet for me to offer.

Another question is a low demand of this type of hosting and the high price that I must set in comparison with normal hosting plans. I, as Squeaker and Seaside user, hope this situation change soon, but at the moment can't offer Squeak hosting :(

Regards.

--- Germán S. Arduino http://www.arsol.biz http://www.arsol.net

"Avi Bryant" avi@beta4.com escribió en el mensaje news:47AC3E3D-97B4-11D8-9DAF-000A95DB7844@beta4.com...

On Apr 26, 2004, at 10:23 AM, Pablo Iaría wrote:

Hi all, Does anybody know if there's some place to host a seaside application for free (just like freezope.org) ?

I don't think there is. How does freezope.org support itself?

Avi

On Apr 26, 2004, at 3:43 PM, Chris Double wrote:

How would Seaside hosting work? Would an application be installed in a shared image, containing other applications from other users? I imagine this would be the most memory efficient for the hoster but would cause problems with editing, security, etc.

Yeah, I don't think that would be a very good idea.

Providing each user with a Squeak VM would be the other option but then how would the hosting provider know that it is being used for Hosting web applications rather than for general purpose Squeak usage?

Well, how does anyone ever know that? For sites that host PHP, for example, someone could conceivably write, say, an IRC server in PHP and get that hosted unknowingly... if you block all ports from the outside and make sure that they can only get through to their application using, say, mod_proxy through an apache vhost config (maybe allowing VNC traffic through as well so they can remotely administer their image), it's unlikely they'll use it for anything but web apps.

You could also set things up so that they could only deploy package files, not full images - there would be a preconfigured Seaside image that their packages would get loaded into, running in a sandbox that wasn't directly user readable or writable. This would give you a little bit more control, and possibly be more convenient for the users anyway.

You'd want to work really hard to strip this image down so that the memory footprint was as small as possible. That's the main problem with Seaside hosting: you need machines with *lots* of RAM.

Avi