Howdy to everyone out there in Zope land. There have been a flurry of emails recently, and a handful of posts as well, regarding commercial Zope Hosting. While I will likely send a private copy of this post to each of the people who have written to us at Digital Creations, separately, I thought that a general posting might be a good thing to do, and it won't be _too_ long, so I hope that no one will mind me hijacking the bandwidth for this "noble" cause. :-) The following block is a verbatim extract from an email I sent to a potential Zope Hosting Provider this morning. I will leave out the contact details to protect the innocent, but I hope the my response to their request to host Zope will be interesting to others who might be considering the same: *** "Well, we truly believe that the market for Zope hosters will grow significantly in the coming year, and further that there is an opportunity for hosters to more easily layer on value-added options to increase the profitability of the account. Some will be home-grown, and some will be avilable commercially or from the community. Now to the hard part. While we constantly strive to improve Zope, and to make it easier to administer in a multi-virtual domain environment, it still isn't perfect in that regard. Therefore, it takes a fair bit of technical know-how, and a willingness to sweat some tears in order to get it just right for your shop. Luckily, the envrionment that you describe above is nearly ideal for Zope, which will mitigate the above somewhat. This will definitely change in the near future (think months not years), so you could wait. The advantage of not waiting is that there are quite a number of people currently looking to find a reliable Zope Hoster. We have one very high quality hoster available now (http://www.codeit.com). They are so good at Zope hosting, that we host both http://www.zope.org and http://www.digicool.com there. We couldn't be happier with the arrangement. Still, the marketplace likes choices, and the next few hosters to truly give Zope the care and attention that it deserves will gain a fair number of new users in a realtively short period of time (my opinion only!). If there is any other info that we can provide, please don't hesitate to ask. If you do decide to host Zope, we'll help you get it right (up to a point, and then perhaps you should consider a support contract). Also, the zope mailing list is extremely knowledgable and helpful with regard to setting up Zope on all types of platforms. Then, we'll happily list you in the Zope Hosting Providers page, and help drive customers to your site!" *** So, if you're a hoster out there who is struggling with the choice as to whether to dive in and offifially offer Zope or not, I hope I've added a little confusion (I mean fuel) to help you over the hump. From my perspective, people who want to host commercial sites on Zope will want to go with "proven" hosters, and not someone who is simply willing to let them start a long running process and "see how it goes". Therefore, those that host early, will be able to build up a credible reference list and snag the people that will eventually discover the beauty and power of Zope. Dive right in, the water is fine. :-)