What are the options for an inexpensive web presence?

Suggested topic for BarCampPortland 2008

Discussion leaders: JimTyhurst, CraigFisk

Small non-profits or start-ups typically have very low traffic, but they want a web presence to manage:

• Content regarding the organization
• Content generated by members or customers
• Member or customer relationships
• Events

These requirements usually translate into a web site with some subset of:

• static content
• form submission
• wiki
• blog
• calendar
• event registration
• product catalog
• online sales

In terms of possible implementations, hosting companies provide a range of solutions from $9 to $99+ per month, ranging from a few static HTML pages to a dedicated server where the customer loads their own software.

Is there a low cost middle ground where open source applications can be run in some standard configuration? In particular, is there any way to get by with less than self-hosting or collocating one or more dedicated servers and still meet the requirements?

We hope this discussion will to lead to a matrix with each possible solution as a row and each type of functionality as a column, maybe with a checkmark or numeric score in a cell for functionality satisfied by a solution. For example:

We invite you to share your favorite configuration of open source or proprietary solutions for an inexpensive organizational web site using Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, or any other technology.

Comments

Renting a ~$20 virtual machine through a company like Slicehost, Linode, Rimu or such can provide you with your own UNIX server and root access, like you'd have on a dedicated/co-located server. Because you have root, you can do whatever you want, install what you need, etc. This virtual server can perform all the tasks listed and more. Although you can technically run .NET apps on UNIX using Mono, you're best off just renting a Windows virtual machine instead, but the rest of the tasks listed are well suited to UNIX. Because you pay for a chunk of the physical server's resources, you're guaranteed to have a usable portion of the server's resources at all times. Because the hosting company takes care of the hardware, you're much less at risk than if you're co-locating because if something breaks, the company has spares on-site and can also easily move your VM to other servers, so hardware failures are resolved quickly. As your needs grow, you simply pay for more resources and they're usually be added within minutes. If you're planning on running any significant number of resource hungry applications (e.g., Java, Rails, Django, etc), you will need to buy more memory or switch to a more expensive plan, but that's just fair. The only real downside is you'll need to have someone that can administer UNIX, or you can learn to use an awkward control panel program like Plesk, but you're still best off knowing UNIX. - IgalKoshevoy