[adlsngreenstone] Hosting solutions

[John Rose]

Dear Colleagues,

Although Stefan Bodie of DLConsulting (Hamilton, New Zealand) replied 
below only to Sandraghassen, the hosting problem is a common one to many 
Greenstone users in Africa. You should perhaps collectively be thinking 
of one or more common solutions in the context of ensuring follow-up and 
sustainability for ADLSN.

Best regards, John Rose of Greenstone Team

On 20/04/2011 01:38, Stefan Boddie wrote:
> Hi Sandraghassen,
>
> My apologies for ignoring you on skype yesterday! I was on another call
> when your message popped up and that call went on for rather a long time...
>
> I've been giving this some thought and I think perhaps we may not be the
> type of service you really need. That is, we do host collections for
> many of our customers but those are all collections we built and
> maintain for those customers. Since you and your partner institutions
> are building your own collections you really need a hosting service that
> gives you more control. That is, you need to be able to log in to
> rebuild your collections, add new material, etc., which we can't really
> offer. We can do all that stuff for you of course (which is what we do
> for our other customers) but I fear that'll make the service too
> expensive, and won't achieve the goals of your project (i.e. you won't
> learn to do this stuff if we do it for you).
>
> So I think a good place to start is to follow up with John Rose about
> hosting with IRD in France. If that doesn't work out you might perhaps
> also consider trying the AWS services from Amazon.com
> (http://aws.amazon.com/). We're currently evaluating AWS as a hosting
> platform and it looks very promising. It will still cost money
> (realistically you might expect to pay up to $100 USD per month for
> enough capacity to host 10 medium-sized Greenstone collections) and it
> has a steep learning curve (it's taken us some time to understand how it
> all works and which of the AWS services we actually need). It may be
> time well spent though, and will certainly be a lower cost solution for
> you than if we do the hosting for you. The nice thing about AWS is you
> only pay for what you use.
>
> If you do decide to try out Amazon AWS what you'll need to set up is an
> "EC2 instance" (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/). That effectively allows you
> to create your own virtual machine running either linux or Windows. So
> you basically end up with your own "server" on which you can install and
> run Greenstone remotely.
>
> I hope some of this helps.
>
> Great work on your first Greenstone collection by the way - it looks
> very nice. And say hello to Amos from me if you see him again - I still
> remember fondly the time I spent working with him in Zimbabwe a few
> years ago.
>
> Kind regards,
> Stefan.
>
>


-- 
                ************

                John B. Rose
                1 Bis rue des Châtre-Sacs
                92310 Sèvres, France

                Email: john.rose1 at free.fr
                Alternate email: johnrose at alumni.caltech.edu