[Zope] Zope Hosters Welcome Here :-)

[Hadar Pedhazur]

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. :-)