![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
triadruidStupidity abounds. First of all, the news from last week is that they're moving us out of our office on the 4th Floor of City Hall, so that they can move someone else into this office from a program that has been moved from DB's building, and integrated into PP's division, who have offices next door to this office. We'll be moving into cubicles on the 4th Floor, because the space at DB that we're supposed to occupy won't be ready for like two years, and the space we used to occupy at RJMMPC was rented out from under us. Confused yet? Good, because today I find out that, if my boss can swing it, we'll be going to RJMMPC after all, instead of to the cubicles. Either way, I'm throwing away old paperwork today, while the building's Internet access goes in and out.
Speaking of the Internet, it's time to poll the VURD. I've actually got two related-but-different problems regarding webhosting, that some of you may have experience with.
First, I help manage a site that was looking to go from static HTML to a CMS, and were all set in May to use Drupal for its many shiny features, until we heard from our ISP that LOCK TABLES is impossible with our hosting package's permissions on MySQL. Since increasing the cost/going to a dedicated server is not feasible at this time, I'm looking for other options. Either we'll have to find another shared hosting solution that supports Drupal (and several out there do, with JaguarPC being my researched frontrunner), or we'll have to go with a different CMS (and still possibly switch providers, but that's another story).
Requirements for a different CMS (very little of this is negotiable):
* Runs on (at least) Apache/2.0.52, PHP/5.1.4, and either MySQL 4.0.25 or PostgreSQL 7.4.5.
* Calendaring is a primary feature of our website, so must be extensible or included by default.
* Must be able to be hosted remotely without root access. Our ISP can install Joomla for us, but I am not sure about any others. We have access to hosted MySQL databases with general SQL privileges to CREATE/ALTER/etc, just not UN/LOCK TABLES.
* Allows custom user groups/roles; for example, Finance should be the only ones to be able to see certain pages, or edit others. Individual accounts can belong to multiple groups, so One-to-Many group membership is essential (many of us wear more than one hat). This was the primary reason we were going with Drupal; Guest/Editor/Publisher/Administrator is not fine-grained enough, which knocked out Joomla and (apparently?) Postnuke. Etomite appears to be almost able to do this, but appears to be stuck in Development Hell since this spring... Xaraya was recommended to me last night, but I haven't had time to look at it fully.
Strong preferences:
* Named links, rather than node/17/234/48569466 - if these are available in some circumstances (static pages) and not others (such as the calendar), that's fine.
* Multiple mailing list support. Archives ideal.
* Decent GUI for editors/publishers; many of our people are not HTML/CSS savvy. WYSIWYG not required, but some sort of rudimentary formatting buttons.
* Open Source, in case we need to edit/add something.
Preferences:
* Wiki or other collaborative effort support or integration. We currently use offsite wikis for tracking certain committee notes and planning, but unifying this with the new login-based site would be ideal.
* PayPal/other online payment system integration would be nice.
In addition to Etomite, I've seen that CMS Made Simple seems to have something like what we're looking for in the way of user permissions, but I don't really have time to help build a new CMS, so only tested solutions, if you please.
Requirements for a different hosting provider are that it be no more expensive than our current provider (~$100/year) and not be wildly oversold (i.e. no BlueHost/HostGator). We're currently using only 200MB of our disk space and 800MB/month of bandwidth, so usage is not severe but would be more than, say, OpenSourceHost wants to provide at that price range.
The second site I'm involved with is wildly different from the first: mainly a gaming forum, it also has a steadily growing MediaWiki installation about the game itself. Currently we're using BlueHost as our provider and while we have plenty of space/bandwidth, they keep throttling us on CPU usage, and have pulled some seriously boneheaded server maneuvers that left us with downtime or broken SQL queries. Again, JaguarPC has some good deals going down right now on semi-managed Virtual Private Servers that could probably solve this problem, so any horror/savior stories about them would be greatly appreciated. Usage on this site is much higher, but not totally outrageous: probably in the neighborhood of 7GB space and 40GB space. The forum is by far the larger part of the site, a heavily modified phpBB2 that we're considering moving to phpBB3 whenever they get around to putting out a final release candidate. It gets about 1400 posts a day currently, and has somewhere around 1000 active users, I'd guess.
P.S. I've already posted to WebHostingTalk and OpenSourceCMS about the first problem, but a personal experience from someone you know is always vastly preferred... just so no one thinks I'm not doing due diligence here. :D
Speaking of the Internet, it's time to poll the VURD. I've actually got two related-but-different problems regarding webhosting, that some of you may have experience with.
First, I help manage a site that was looking to go from static HTML to a CMS, and were all set in May to use Drupal for its many shiny features, until we heard from our ISP that LOCK TABLES is impossible with our hosting package's permissions on MySQL. Since increasing the cost/going to a dedicated server is not feasible at this time, I'm looking for other options. Either we'll have to find another shared hosting solution that supports Drupal (and several out there do, with JaguarPC being my researched frontrunner), or we'll have to go with a different CMS (and still possibly switch providers, but that's another story).
Requirements for a different CMS (very little of this is negotiable):
* Runs on (at least) Apache/2.0.52, PHP/5.1.4, and either MySQL 4.0.25 or PostgreSQL 7.4.5.
* Calendaring is a primary feature of our website, so must be extensible or included by default.
* Must be able to be hosted remotely without root access. Our ISP can install Joomla for us, but I am not sure about any others. We have access to hosted MySQL databases with general SQL privileges to CREATE/ALTER/etc, just not UN/LOCK TABLES.
* Allows custom user groups/roles; for example, Finance should be the only ones to be able to see certain pages, or edit others. Individual accounts can belong to multiple groups, so One-to-Many group membership is essential (many of us wear more than one hat). This was the primary reason we were going with Drupal; Guest/Editor/Publisher/Administrator is not fine-grained enough, which knocked out Joomla and (apparently?) Postnuke. Etomite appears to be almost able to do this, but appears to be stuck in Development Hell since this spring... Xaraya was recommended to me last night, but I haven't had time to look at it fully.
Strong preferences:
* Named links, rather than node/17/234/48569466 - if these are available in some circumstances (static pages) and not others (such as the calendar), that's fine.
* Multiple mailing list support. Archives ideal.
* Decent GUI for editors/publishers; many of our people are not HTML/CSS savvy. WYSIWYG not required, but some sort of rudimentary formatting buttons.
* Open Source, in case we need to edit/add something.
Preferences:
* Wiki or other collaborative effort support or integration. We currently use offsite wikis for tracking certain committee notes and planning, but unifying this with the new login-based site would be ideal.
* PayPal/other online payment system integration would be nice.
In addition to Etomite, I've seen that CMS Made Simple seems to have something like what we're looking for in the way of user permissions, but I don't really have time to help build a new CMS, so only tested solutions, if you please.
Requirements for a different hosting provider are that it be no more expensive than our current provider (~$100/year) and not be wildly oversold (i.e. no BlueHost/HostGator). We're currently using only 200MB of our disk space and 800MB/month of bandwidth, so usage is not severe but would be more than, say, OpenSourceHost wants to provide at that price range.
The second site I'm involved with is wildly different from the first: mainly a gaming forum, it also has a steadily growing MediaWiki installation about the game itself. Currently we're using BlueHost as our provider and while we have plenty of space/bandwidth, they keep throttling us on CPU usage, and have pulled some seriously boneheaded server maneuvers that left us with downtime or broken SQL queries. Again, JaguarPC has some good deals going down right now on semi-managed Virtual Private Servers that could probably solve this problem, so any horror/savior stories about them would be greatly appreciated. Usage on this site is much higher, but not totally outrageous: probably in the neighborhood of 7GB space and 40GB space. The forum is by far the larger part of the site, a heavily modified phpBB2 that we're considering moving to phpBB3 whenever they get around to putting out a final release candidate. It gets about 1400 posts a day currently, and has somewhere around 1000 active users, I'd guess.
P.S. I've already posted to WebHostingTalk and OpenSourceCMS about the first problem, but a personal experience from someone you know is always vastly preferred... just so no one thinks I'm not doing due diligence here. :D
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
I actually have nothing of use to offer here, but I wanted to let you know that I sympathize.
Date: 2007-10-15 07:40 pm (UTC)