Sorry Markus, Everyone fears coming home from vacation to find their website burned down.
Maybe you can hire a website security company, buy some website insurance or find a website sitter. Seriously though, analogies are not only fun, but how's the following for a business idea. A company that you give FTP or sFTP access to your website. It not only backs up everything, and tracks every single change through a web based versioning control system, but can automatic roll back and even flags malicious changes. Make it general consumer friendly. Give it a nice "web 2.0" interface. Sell it to self hosters regardless of whom they're hosting with as "insurance, security, and backup". This not only can be a transparent service instead of bogging down would be DIY types with the need to buy your designs or run their workflow through you or use you as a host. But it will let the end user go crazy customizing their code, playing with open source, using whatever host provider they want. Giving them true *fredom to tinker*... now that they now have a saftey net. websaftey.net, it's actually available. Does something similar already exist? Now build on it... add in security analysis... ie. making sure permissions are correct on all your files... i.e. giving you status on wether your software installed on your server is up to date Maybe... if the technical requirements aren't to bad it could even install certain open source packages automatically regardless of hosting provider. What about the ability to switch hosts? Or mirror a website on a different domain with the click of a button? The ability to edit or upgrade or test a service and then roll it to the users main site. Perhaps this webservice could orient the market in a different way. Perhaps it could focus on a particular niche say video, customizing it's services for videobloggers...i.e installing wordpress themes vPip, etc. At it's core the backup and versioning is more then enough to sell to every web2.0 person out there for $5 - $10 a month and make mondo money, but the possibilities on where it can go from there are endless. The key is you're doing the same thing to hosting providers as so caled "web2.0" services like gmail have done to Outlook, Eudora and other email desktop clients. You're moving key services from the hosting providers into the "cloud" as services and thus reducing the dependancy on hosting companies proprietary features. In a sense your comoditizing the hosting provider the way the web is commoditizing the Microsoft OS, Microsoft Office, Outlook, Word, Excell, etc. You could go on to make this a gateway and a security net for not so tech savy people so they can try out open source packages regardless of different hosting providers. Perhaps one day... if you base this webservice on open source and work on building standards everyone from drupal to wordpress will work toward you to create a sort of web based "package manager" for the internet. In this way your webservice might install software cleanly onto any host that uses a standardized linux install base. Thus you created an ecosystem. An new sort of API by which hosting providers can interact with webservices. This "package manager for the internet", would be like the package managers used on desktop linux, but instead of installing software on your desktop they'd install it on your website... think CMS, wikis, blogs and more. Perhaps even custom videoblogging solutions such as themes, vPIP, etc. The internet is after all the new desktop. The desktop computer for many is just a dummy terminal you use to access the internet. Hence the rise of the netbook. The internet is where your email is, where your photoalbum/editor are, where your write and where you publish. So why not think of the domain, your website, as the new desktop. Using this metaphor, what other services could be stripped off of the hosting provider? You could possibly even avoid the problems inherent with running server side code on joeblowsblog.com buy creating an "ultra secure" option where all the code is run on this new webservice (similar to what blogger.com does) and only static html and files live on joeblow's domain. You could run this whole service through Amazon S3's hosting and computing cloud so it scales like the devil, and only charge the user for that processing and hosting that they require. If such "web 2.0" type service could handle the domain management and subdomain it could assign a subdomain to itself, i.e. code.joeblowsblog.comto run, manage, and update joe blow's code securely while leaving only static code (HTML, images, movie files) on joeblowsblog.com. In this way such a service could avoid the pitfalls of setting up different open source packages on different hosting providers whom may be using anything from Microsoft, to Debian to unix. Though perhaps if done in open source you could forge relationships with hosting providers that use standardized open source and thus create an interaction model... an API, by which you can create "a standardized package manager for the open source internet" This idea in the end might be two ideas 1) security and a saftey net for self hosters websites 2) and in the bigger picture... a "web based package manager" or "package manager as web service" in the grand web 2.0 style, to install and automatically update open source packages that run on webservers. Not sure I got the point across, maybe / maybe not, but heh I was brainstorming. :P -Mike On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 7:12 PM, Tim Street <[email protected]> wrote: > MIke? > > Why did you have to say that? > > Now I want to go on vacation for a month. ;-) > > > Tim Street > [email protected] > http://1timstreet.com/blog > http://twitter.com/1timstreet > > On Feb 8, 2009, at 3:57 PM, Mike Meiser wrote: > > > To use your car analogy most people simply take it to the dealer for > > maintence. > > There is no dealer for self hosting. Dreamhost nor any other provide > > that > > sort of support. That type of structure does not exist. > > > > Most people are not technically literate enough to manage the constant > > stream of upgrades. I myself while technically capable, cut a hard > > edge on > > maintence issues. If I go on vacation for a month, I simply don't > > want to > > worry about it. And a month of ignoring it is all it takes... now > > multiply > > that by the rest of your life. Most people underestimate how much > > the long > > term maintence costs are while underestimating their own capactity > > to handle > > that constant maintence. > > > > These people should simply NOT be self hosting... unless they use > > blogger.com which requires no maintence. > > > > It's that simple. > > > > -Mike > > > > On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 6:41 PM, David Howell <[email protected]> > > wrote: > > > > > I'm sorry but the Wordpress site owners that are having their sites > > > hacked are the same people that buy a car and expect to never have > > to > > > change the oil in it. > > > > > > Running a self-hosted site means being able to manage one as well. > > If > > > you don't want to manage it, then you use sites like Blogger. > > Blogger > > > is great for that. No frills. No muss. No fuss. No extras. > > > > > > If you dont want to manage it yourself, you hire people like me that > > > will not only design and build it but manage it as well. If you want > > > to do it all yourself, please read the manual, secure it and keep it > > > up do date with patches. Your unsecured site causes problems for > > everyone. > > > > > > If you dont change the oil in your car, dont cry when it's > > eventually > > > sitting dead on the side of the road. > > > > > > David Howell > > > http://www.davidhowellstudios.com > > > > > > --- In [email protected], Mike Meiser > > > <groups-yahoo-...@...> wrote: > > > > > > > > Sad to hear. :( > > > > I'm assuming he was running wordpress? > > > > > > > > I've seen way to many wordpress blogs hacked. The problem is just > > > maintence, > > > > you have to keep wordpress constantly up to date to patch security > > > holes. If > > > > you don't it will inevitably get hacked. Same goes for all server > > > side open > > > > source. > > > > > > > > Many times I've wanted to redo my blogger.com blog in wordpress, > > indeed > > > > wordpress is simply better, but the truth is blogger.com is > > > virtually hack > > > > proof since there's absolutely no server side code running. It's > > all > > > handled > > > > by blogger.com and written to the server via sftp. I've really > > come to > > > > appreciate this rock solid security and ZERO maintenance, and to > > be > > > honest > > > > it's the primary reason I simply recommend blogger over > > wordpress to > > > anyone > > > > who wants to self host on their own domain. The exception being if > > > they're a > > > > developer and already running code on their server, in which case > > > they're > > > > probably aware enough of the maintenance issues to run wordpress. > > > > > > > > Lately I've been doing a lot of work in the bike industry and it > > > seems the > > > > entire industry from shop owners, to racers to bike makers runs > > almost > > > > exclusively on a blogspot hosted ecosystem. It simply works. > > > > > > > > P.S. a good auto-backup system or version control system for your > > > blog is a > > > > MUST if you run wordpress. A lot of hosting providers include this > > > stock. > > > > > > > > -Mike > > > > mmeiser.com/blog > > > > flickr.com/photos/mmeiser2 > > > > > > > > > > > > On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 6:42 AM, Steve Watkins <st...@...> wrote: > > > > > > > > > Looking back a page or 2 on his twitter history, I think the > > site got > > > > > hacked. > > > > > > > > > > http://twitter.com/joshleo > > > > > > > > > > Cheers > > > > > > > > > > Steve > > > > > > > > > > --- In [email protected], David King <davidleeking@> > > > wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > > Anyone know what happened to josh Leo's site (joshleo.com)? > > It looks > > > > > > like it is gone ... & I really like his videos! > > > > > > > > > > > > Just curious > > > > > > > > > > > > Sent from my iPhone > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > ------------------------------------ > > > > > > > > > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > ------------------------------------ > > > > > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] > > > > > > > > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] > > > > ------------------------------------ > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
