I posted the following on the VA4ROC board and thought this could help other chapters with their start-up.

A couple of my friends have their websites on Amhosting.com and have no complaints with their service. Prices range from $5 - $30 per month depending on the package plan selected. What do you think?

I'm going to post this to the main 4ROC board as well for the other state chapters to check out too.

 

Another option is http://www.digitalcrowd.com/
It is who I am now using for my personal 4Runner website, and YotaTech is also hosted on it.

We be on the same server, and Scott the owner is a great guy to work with.

I am very pleased with the service.

 

Thats alot of mulah. I say just have each chapter use its own webmaster and buy a domain name ($10 a year).

 

Another option, is someone just get 4roc.org or whatever it's going to be and put the chapters under that. Then just pay my company $5/mo for the chapter sites as subs of the main (i.e. http://co.4roc.org or www.4roc.org/co for the colorado page for example), that's cheap, easy, and someday when the national organization takes fold building a main page and cross linking everything becomes exceedingly trivial.

I would be willing to hold off charging for the main page until it was actually being used for the nat'l group, I'd just need to collect for the chapters themselves to cover the disk space and bandwidth used. I'll even knock off $1/mo if you paid for a chapter's site a year in advance, so it would only be $48/year for site dues.

This also prevents the chapters from having to pay for the domain. One other thing I am willing to do, is front the cost of the domain name with the understanding that when the national organization happens I would be paid back for my cost on that, so that way there isn't a bunch of "who should pay for it" stuff.

What do you all think?

 

Will the subdomains be able to handle different software, ie. VA.4ROC.COM on frontpage and BC.4ROC.COM on Pagemaker? Otherwise it sounds pretty good, especially for scalability and future development.

 

Yeah, those are just development applications. The server doesn't really care what you make it with, you just upload the files and that's it.

I'd like a couple more people to say "ok" to my offer before I proceed with it, but I will watch the thread and see what people think.

 

Sounds generally good to me, will discuss with VA4ROC. How much storage per subdomain? I think pictures and write ups may be a big thing, possibly less Bulletin board since we can use this one.
So would that be VA4ROC.YOTATECH.COM or VA4ROC.4ROC.COM? either could work, one would give a more tenable connection to the mothership, but there's no substitute for a domain name...

 

There need not be any yotatech in the URL.
All you need to do is go to Godaddy and buy your own domain name for under $10, then contact Scott at the Digital Crowd URL I posted.

At the Godaddy site you plug in the DNS numbers for Scott's server, and within 24 hours the DNS gets resolved and your page on his server would point to www.4roc.com or whatever domain name you end up buying.

I own www.pnw4runners.com/tando and www.pnw4runners.net/tando
and they both have the DNS pointing to his server and work.

 

True... only thing is, then every chapter has to buy their own domain and pay $15 a month... I'm only asking $4/mo per chapter to cover my costs and I will front the cost of the domain to put them all under, handle the server admin for everyone (they just upload pages), etc. DigitalCrowd looks like a good company, I'm just tossing this out there since I'd (obviously) love to host the 4roc thing for you guys since it's something I plan to be involved in anyway.

Storage-wise, I'd say if you can keep the subdomains under about 500mb each I'd appreciate it (should not be a problem if it's just some static web pages and images, it probably won't get over 50), but I'm not going to put a hard limit on it, just use what you need. I don't really see it getting out of hand. You can use this board or one of your own there, it doesn't matter to me. Linking direct to your respective 4roc forum here is of course an easy thing to do...

 

i posted this somewhere else but I'm not sure where but www.doteasy.com costs more to register the domain name but they provide the hosting for free (no banners or ads). As long as you don't need anything complicated like server side processing, it should be more than sufficient for all of your needs.

 

probably should've put this in my last post but another option would be to just purchase a domain for a low cost like at godaddy and have the domain forward to another address... anyone with broadband or is in college will probably have bannerless webspace. (i.e. filebox.vt.edu for virginia tech students, or Cox Cable Personal webspace.) Some people never take advantage of this webspace...

 

Some free space would be ideal, but I would consider a permanently stable location over a college address, ya gotta leave college eventually. Am anxious to get VA off of tripod and their dmaned pop ups, but would rather not move more than necessary. I would personally wait for an ideal host.

As long as the subdomains can DEFINITELY handle different website programs, I'd say let's go with XX.4roc.com

 

They will, for sure. Programs like Frontpage, Dreamweaver, or a slew of others, are graphical apps just meant to design the page. The only time you run into issues is when those programs try to use some kind of weird funky server-side program for a script, i.e Frontpage Extensions (which I currently do not have enabled - they are very insecure, and the same things can be accomplished other ways).

However if you make a page in FP and the same thing in Dreamweaver, the web server does not care. You just upload them and that's that. Sounds like this site (yotatech) will be taking care of the online forums as well so that is one less thing to worry about.

If this sounds cool with you, I will register the domain and park it on my server, and if chapters want to start building XX.4roc.org (until .com is available) sites they can just contact me. Yay? Nay?

 

denverbikeguy, some questions:

1. I know you said $4/mo/chapter. What additional are you thinking for the "master"?

2. So, if you pick up 4roc.org, and set up subdomains for the children, can we also have overlay domains (e.g. ca4roc.com) that point to the same physical space?

3. For chapters that really want to host their own, can they opt for some kind of forwarding (e.g. wy.4roc.org -> www.fubarisp.com/~johndoe/wyNot4roc)

4. You said PHP and MySQL support was available, right? On a Unix platform? (I'm used to manglesoft ASP, but I can adapt.)

5. Would separate administrators be able to independently access different subdomains? (like, I can access the California stuff, but I can't change the background color on Prolax's stuff to a deep chartreuse...). Could we also have multiple admins / area?
(or would we just use a shared account. never mind.)


I'm willing to free host any of these until we get fired up, including the 4roc.org, but I don't have the net capacity of a real outfit like yours. I'd rather go your way fairly soon if reasonable and agreeable to the masses. I've got California and Florida now, but I wanted to try and do some prep work for the master site, so this seems timely!

 

I have http://www.darkfiles.net/hosting.html . Cheapest hosting you can get. And you get ALOT!! 1000mb for just $8/mo. They used to do 500mb for $3, but I guess they no longer have that. Still $8 is damn cheap. Their support is great too. Guys even gave me their AIM names...

 

I know that VA and NC sites are on frontpage, and it is likely that many more will be too, so we MUST have frontpage extensions. What can we do to use FP but not have script issues?

 

1. Well, my usual rate plan is $19/mo for the domain then the virtual site rate under that. However I will hold off charging anything for the master until a) the site exists and b) something exists to pay for it (like a national organization), and if enough chapters are formed under it that rate would drop anyway.

2. You can, I'd like to use name based hosting however rather than tie up a zillion IP addresses for this. To make that work we can do one of two things: First option, point the domains somewhere else, and the index page there just redirects to xx.4roc.org. Second (and better) option is for my server to house for example ca4roc.org as a virtual site which just gets sent to the ca.4roc.org page on the server. I would not charge extra for this, and can even house the extra DNS records if need be.

3. Yeah that's cool.

4. Yep! What did you have in mind? We usually charge a little extra for the MySQL stuff (like another $1-2 a month) but again if more than a couple sites are active I can just waive that. I doubt you will be slamming the DB stuff anyway...

5. I can set up the permissions however you need, standard unix users/groups should work fine for that. I was also thinking of trying out a web-based file management tool, if you guys are interested in that, so you wouldn't have to worry about getting the files there through FTP or something.

I'm good to go anytime, I just need the ok and I can have it set up pretty quickly.

dajabr - They're developed with FP, but are they actually using the extensions? (i.e. built in page counters, etc) You can develop a site w/o extensions enabled and upload it you just don't get FP's built in toys. I'd have to look into what it would take to securely enable them if they're absolutely required, since I don't want my server getting hacked, however just about everything the extensions do can be accomplished with some javascript or PHP code anyway.

 

VA is pretty heavy on extensions, page counter, navigation, banners, transitions. Did the scrollbar colors with CSS though. Not a huge thing to lose FP, just more work than I want to handle a second time. What would be your preferrred program? Will consider migrating to save the jazz...

 

What's the URL of your page so I can see what's running now?

I'm researching what it would take to enable FP extensions even for just the subdomains that need it in a secure fashion, so as to not impact what you guys want to do. If I can provide it for you and not get hacked in the process I don't have a problem with it. I just want to make sure I know about the newest version's details before taking the plunge.

 

denverbikeguy;

This is most generous of you! Thank you!

I have some more questions down the lines of where Scottiac was going.

1. To support Scottiac's asking about PHP and MySQL, I know that the WA chapter wants to have a local BBS. Most of the current ones are PHP scripts.

2. Will you allow local shell access?

3. Any support for simple mailing llists, or with a "yes" answer for #2, then can we install a simple list ourselves?

4. How do you feel about anon FTP?

5. If we wanted a bit more disk space, (say, a couple of gig if we're going to run a BBS) can we pay you for it?


Thank you!

Mark