IF, and it's a large IF, but IF you're willing to maintain your own machine than a slicehost with an open source CFML engine isn't all that much more expensive than a shared hosting plan. For $20 USD a month you can have a linode running whatever flavor of headless linux that you want. Throw on Webmin/Virtualmin to handle site creation and updates. Throw on Railo on Tomcat. MySQL for DB, apache to serve web traffic. Use IPTables to lockdown all but SSH/HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/DNS. Virtualmin can be set to automatically check for package updates and deploy them on a set schedule. It can backup to an S3 bucket. Railo can be set to update automatically as well. Everything that is running is basically "free", it's just going to cost you in time if you're not familiar with it.
Now, the cost in time for setup? That's going to be higher than just going with a shared host, but I personally found that my time is far offset against dealing with the latest issues that have come up with vulnerabilities. NOTE: this doesn't address PCI compliance as I've not had to go down that route. In that instance shared may still yet be cheaper, but given the prices I've seen on shared hosts that are PCI compliant, I still think it'd be cheaper to roll your own. But then, I'm able to do the admin and dev side of things. -- Matthew Williams Geodesic GraFX www.geodesicgrafx.com/blog twitter.com/ophbalance ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:354457 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/unsubscribe.cfm
