I have become a zope hoster without ever wanting to. I can not see how zope hosting in itself will ever pay for its cost. For the time being we only do it for customers we do other consulting jobs. However we may not expect zope to become widely used if there is no easy access to hosting services. Next to that there is a rule I believe that out of 10 good prospects for a busines oportunity one will really "prosper. So what we need to do is giving them a fertil ground to sprout. Hosting Zope I believe could be such a soil. That said, I willingly help for any attempt to make Zope hosting easy. Only my expirience in that behalv is not really big. Robert ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joachim Werner" <joe@iuveno-net.de> To: "Robert Rottermann" <robert@redcor.ch>; <Zope@zope.org>; "Jan Lentfer" <jan.lentfer@web.de> Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 5:56 PM Subject: Re: [Zope] beehive zope hosting (OT?)
Hi Joachim, can you talk a bit how you did that automatic creation of accounts ??
Hi!
Well, what we are doing right now is "semi-automatic" and not too much magic, as we still have to manually check the contracts. Except for long-time customers, we can not allow creation of accounts over the web.
It is currently just a combination of an instance home configuration with a modified "zstart" script and a config file, where you can add new accounts by adding a single line and restarting the script. It will then check for non-existing processes, create the instance home directory structure and start them.
Products are managed by symbolic-linking them into the local products folder, so we don't have to go through all the accounts for updates.
Plans are there for a really cool hosting system with automatic generation of everything from the Domain Name registration and the Apache configuration to the Zope and Zope Products configuration. But that one will take some more time and will quite probably NOT be open source, except if somebody is willing to share costs ...
If you are interested in contributing to it, feel free to contact me ;-)
Joachim