Zahid Malik wrote: > > Out of interest what would small-to-medium NGOs class as a reasonable > price for Plone hosting services? What I have found is that $30 -$50 US per month is what clients in this space are willing to pay for shared type hosting. In addition to Plone hosting, clients usually have the expectation of email services being included in this price. This size of org usually does not need the resources of a dedicated server. > As has been said there are a lot of > pretty reasonably priced hosting solutions out there already - they > might not do much hand holding for plone setup but then we have lists > like this and other community lists that can help. There are lots of generic hosting options that is true. Zope hosting is a much more limited market. In addition, there seems to be fewer US based hosts as compared to Europe, the only real issue there is having similar time zones for support issues. I have done some research into hosting options, checking lists of Zope solutions provdiers, googling and the like, and I don't really get the impression that this hosting space is growing.
> Admittedly this is not as nice as having > control panels etc but would be a start. > > What matters is what people think of as reasonably priced as the > prices for dedicated servers and, especially, shared virtual servers > can be very reasonable (to me at least). Whether you get proper > support at that price is a different matter.... What small-medium sized groups need from a host as far as support, is to be insulated from the sysadmin details of configuring Apache and keeping Zope running in a stable and reliable manner, rotating logs etc. All things that hosts with control panel type setups manage or give a simple/safe way to configure. For LAMP based hosting companies that are having to compete in a cut throat market, there is definitely a business opportunity for providing Plone hosting. For small-medium sized groups, without dedicated IT, having more hosting options and packages to choose from would do much to increase adoption. Plone desktop (Windows/Mac) installation is a huge win. Bringing a similar type of ease of use to the hosting space would be huge. Aaron. -- Aaron VanDerlip Programmer NetCorps Eugene Oregon 541 465 1127 x104 Reclaim Your Inbox! http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird _______________________________________________ NGO mailing list [email protected] http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo
