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schwern (1528)

schwern
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Schwern can destroy CPAN at his whim.

Journal of schwern (1528)

Thursday January 31, 2008
11:48 AM

Let 1000 Perl Web Sites Bloom!

[ #35537 ]

All the time I hear folks who have ideas for projects but then they say "yeah, but I don't have a server to put it on" or "I don't have a domain name for it" or "is this going to be the official site for X" or "I'd have to get a perl.org domain for it". And then that's where the idea dies for simple lack of hosting.

I am now taking away that excuse. Dreamhost has a promotion system where any member can provide a deep discount for friends to sign up. I have made such a promo. You can have a hosted account with then for $69.40 a year if you click this link and use the promo code "1001PERLSBLOOM". Pay with a credit card and you have three months to decide you want a refund. It also comes with two free domains and a unique IP address.

$69 for the first year, three months to decide if it's a good idea, two domain registrations, mail, wikis, a subversion repository, unique IP and a shell account. Their support is fantastic. Just look at all this crap you get! It's all the tools you need to put together your neat Perl idea for the cost of going out to eat.

"But... but... but..." yes, yes, yes it's not the absolute perfect system. Suck it up. This is the best you'll find at this price. If you wait around until you build your own you'll never do it. And you can always move it later. The important thing is "I don't have a server" is no longer an excuse for not doing your awesome Perl idea.

Go forth and let one thousand Perl web sites bloom!


(The one thing that is missing is mod_perl, they use FastCGI which is good enough for most things. But if you know of an equivalent service with mod_perl please post it).

(For those conspiracy theorists out there, no I'm not making money off of this)


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  • I have a reasonably specced server with Burton Hosting that's available for perl related projects. I'll generally be able to set up whatever mod_perl related madness people want.

    If anyone needs hosting, a shell account, MySQL or Pg, mod_perl, perl friendly sysadmin give me a shout. I run DNS and mail and stuff too.

    Free of charge for good causes.

  • You seem to have missed the memo that the maximum discount you can get at signup is now $50 (since mid-December 2007 IIRC).

    A referral is still worth $97, but only $50 of that can now be taken off the hosting bill, so if you want to use the other $47 of your code you have to use it for things such as extra IP addresses, extra domain names, etc.

    That means that the first year will now be at least $69.40.
    --

    -- 
    Esli epei eto cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
    Aettot ibrec epesecoth, spakhea scrifeteis.

  • No matter what the discount, it seems like some of that Perl Foundation money sitting in the bank might be put to good use here. Paying $50 to ten different people to have a go at a website seems pretty cheap even if only one of them works out. :)
    • I think folks can cough up $50 to play around with a server. Keep the grant money for something more serious and unique like paying Nick Clark to continue his mad optimization sweeps through Perl 5.
      • If they can cough up the $50, they don't need you to help them do it :)

        TPF has a lot of money. They are not in a position where they have to choose :)
    • My only concern with the TPF nano-grant idea is that it could add bureaucracy and delay and that gets in the way of the JFDI.

      To me an ideal solution would be that TPF says "We're got 10 open slots for nanogrants, first 10 people to put up something interesting gets the $50 from us." (Modulo logistics, of course) Key here is "Go do it, we'll pay you for it later."

      --

      --
      xoa

      • The only one who can add bureaucracy is TPF. It doesn't have to be like that, though.

        Not that I really care. I think if anyone had the motivation and ability to do something, and more importantly to maintain it, they don't need someone else to set up a web hosting account for them.

  • If you're willing to forego mod_perl and your own IP address, I've found http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ [nearlyfreespeech.net] to be dirt cheap and more than worth every penny. Yes, you don't get as much as you might get elsewhere. But you don't pay near as much, either. Likely you can try it out for three months for less than fifty cents, unless you make something wildly successful, in which case I'll bet you can more than cover your costs with a paypal donation link.

    Personally I wouldn't pay more or go elsewhere unless I

    --
    J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
    • It's my experience that Paypal donation buttons don't work. I've had one on a mirror of software I run for an old 8 bit machine for *years* and have got a grand total of 25p. My Wikipedia proxy [cantrell.org.uk] which strips all the crap from the pages to make them load faster has had no donations at all, despite being used fairly heavily.
  • Alternatively, for people who have more time than money, they could consider using a pay-as-you-go webhost such as NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, which can cost you as little as a penny a year, depending on how much disk space and bandwidth you need.

    One downside is that you'd have to set up all the fancy stuff such as a blog, a wiki, a subversion repository, a domain name, etc. yourself; there's no control panel with one-click installs, no free domain name and no static IP address. (Though you do get a MySQL process
    --

    -- 
    Esli epei eto cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
    Aettot ibrec epesecoth, spakhea scrifeteis.

    • Oh good; I'm not the only one who mentioned NFS. :)

      For the record, I've installed almost everything you describe on NFS: a wiki, a subversion repository, domain names, etc. I don't think I ever installed a blog, but I've done webforums. I view no control panel as an advantage. :) NFS expects you to do most administration through ssh, which means they are people who think like me. :)

      I think MySQL is actually no extra cost for only one instance, but I could be wrong, as I know that the pricing changed

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
      • Yes, MySQL used to be free but is now $0.01 for the first process and $0.02 for every additional process. Plus $0.01 if you want InnoDB IIRC.
        --

        -- 
        Esli epei eto cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
        Aettot ibrec epesecoth, spakhea scrifeteis.

  • I was about to jump on Dreamhost, glad I waited. But last I checked they run Perl 5.8.4, tho they claim you can roll yer own...has anyone built a private 5.8.8 or 5.10 on Dreamhost ? Any instructions or advice much appreciated!
    • Yes, they still run 5.8.4. I believe it's Debian stable. I've asked them to upgrade and they said they'd do it if they got more folks to ask for it. So please ask for it.

      I found that Perl will not compile in Dreamhost's environment due to a bug in Cwd. I've fixed that bug [cpan.org] and you have to patch the perl source tree with it.

      If this is sounding scary I can roll a tarball.
  • Dreamhost ALSO allows you to run as many sites as you like under a single account at no additional cost as long as you don't blow your bandwidth limits.

    I run about 15 domains under my single account.

    If anyone needs a simple website added, let me know and I'll happily tack it on to mine.
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