[Seaside] Seaside hosting questions - multiple sites, uploading

[Cees de Groot]

Avi Bryant <avi@beta4.com> said:
>This would certainly all be possible, although I don't know of any hosting
>providers actively supporting Squeak.
>
With a VM that heats up your processors, no wonder ;-). 

Seriously: I'm hosting Squeak on user-mode-linux boxen (you get the root
password), that's the most flexible, most secure (for me ;-)) way to set this
up. With multiple VM's running alongside on a single box, you run into the
problem that Squeak server sockets cannot bind to a single address, so
there's no way that multiple Squeak VM's all share port 80 (like I routinely
do with other stuff). I'd fixed it long ago, if it weren't for the fact that
one should fix it across all the platforms and my MacOS and Windows socket
programming is rusty (let alone that I lack the hardware to test it). I do
have a hack for VisualWorks that lets you start a (suid root) VM as a normal
user and get to create a server socket on port 80, so that wouldn't pose a
problem. 

Therefore, my user-mode-linux solution. However, that's a costly solution
(somewhere between 50-100 euro per month). Probably more expensive than a
dedicated rack box in some big colo center, although the user-mode-linux
machine won't break if the hardware goes down (just reboot on a different
machine - neat, not? :-)).

Image size is not a big issue: the unused portions just get swapped out and
swap is extremely cheap.

>> Also, is there a cgi version of squeak?
>
>Squeak isn't a very good fit with CGI - better would be GNU Smalltalk or
>Ruby, which have much lower startup time and process overhead.  Squeak
>makes more sense for long running application servers (closer to the Java
>Servlet model than to CGI).
>
I'd expected you to give a FastCGI/mod_lisp answer here...

Anyway, in the interest of Squeak diversification, I think it would be an
interesting experiment to build a server VM that a) would startup with
a built-in VNC server, b) would allow the user to open just a single,
specified, server socket (so that the user's can't 'steal' each other's
sockets). Under these conditions, hosting Squeak boxen would be very much
possible for a hosting provider (moi) and probably not too expensive.

-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg@cdegroot.com>
GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD  1986 F303 937F E098 9E8B
Cogito ergo evigilo