>But anyway, is there ANY real market for very low-end cheap shared >AOLserver hosting at all? Whether we like it or not, Apache owns that >market, and other than pure academic (all us software engineers >helping to educate each other), bottom dollar shared hosting is the >only reason I can think of to be looking into these different sorts of >"1 process, but 100 different independent websites each completely >protected from each other" models. Is that what you were thinking >about here Bas, you want to use something like that to bring AOLserver >to the masses?
I originally asked the question because I work for a regional ISP that's looking to host up to about 5000 virtual servers. And we are seriously considering AOLServer because we're anal about security. We want any dynamic code that the customers write to be run as their system user so that we can be certain that they do not have access to resources beyond their small corner of the server. Our other option is to use Apache, setuid Perl CGI, and run PHP in protected mode. If we could have gotten perchild to work or if AOLServer would run virtual servers as different system users easily, then we would choose AOLServer without hesitation. >If I ran a massive low-end hosting service like that maybe I'd want to >play with that, but I don't see the market for it. Right now anyone >who knows they want to use AOLserver is almost by definition a >relatively sophisticated user, and they're going to prefer the >current, more powerful "I have my own AOLserver process and can do >whatever I want with it" model if they can get it. AOLServer supports: PHP, Perl CGI, and easy extensibility. It supports MySQL and MSSQL. It's fast, it's lightweight, and it's remarkably easy to manage because the initialization script is an actual piece of code (meaning it's fairly trivial to dynamically generate nsd.tcl from LDAP or MySQL). Why would there not be a market for it? >So my guess is nearly all the potential users of such a low-end >service don't care about Apache vs. AOLserver at all, they just want >something cheap. So, if the users don't care, would the (much more >informed) people running this large cheap hosting service care? Would >AOLserver give them some big win over Apache (e.g., automatic >management, reliability, performance)? I don't know, but my guess is, >probably not. The potential users? Correct. The system administrator who wants to minimize overhead and maximize security cares very much. >It would be fun to be really well contradicted on this, though! Not trying to completely contradict you, but we're a hosting operation and we would deploy AOLServer if it did everything we wanted. Because Apache doesn't. -jag -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
