CoPress announces hosting plan for college newspaper Web sites

[Greg Linch]

Hey everyone,

We've launched our hosting page with a blog post. Here's the link:

http://www.copress.org/2008/12/announcing-copress-hosting-plan-for-college-newspaper-web-sites/

Please promote it (and the hosting page www.copress.org/hosting) on Twitter, Facebook, your blog, bar napkins, whatever.

Thanks!
Greg

[Alex Klein]

Hello everyone,

I forwarded this email to our Online Department (of which I'm a member). Since my "expertise" is more with content, design, and management, I specifically solicited feedback from our more technical guy, Dean. Here's what he had to say. (Keep in mind that we're planning on using Drupal, so we wouldn't be ideal candidates for CoPress Hosting anyway.)

I don't like the idea of sharing a server with other papers, the primary reason being that if another site receives record traffic the response time of our site will suffer as an result. The specifications for the server hosting all the virtual servers is actually lower than what I was planning for our site only. To put it in perspective, the desktop in my dorm is much better configured than that server.

Their hosting plan also seems to be geared towards wordpress, which is much less demanding resource wise than drupal.

My current two ideas for hosting is colocation which is essentially means we build a server and send it to a datacenter(lots in Raleigh) and they take it from there, connecting us to their their network. The main advantage there is that we can have a very powerful and dependable server that takes advantage of the latest technologies and is optimized for Drupal, that we can also access very easily for upgrades and troubleshooting since it's in Raleigh.There's a upfront cost for the server (about $2000-3000), but if you work it out over a 12-24 month period, with a server equivelent of a $700 monthly plan it makes a lot of sense.

There is also Amazon EC2 which may offer greater flexibility when there is large traffic, but the costs may be higher depending on the type of traffic we get.

Hopefully you find his feedback helpful. If you'd like to get in touch with him to ask him questions or otherwise pick his brain, let me know! Despite what he said about the technical aspects of the server, I think the hosting service CoPress is offering is a great idea and will be well-received. I guess it all depends on how many papers switch to WordPress, though, doesn't it?

Thanks for inviting me to be a part of CoPress. I'm going to let Kevin, Daniel, Greg, etc. do all the wonderful work they're doing (and have been doing for quite some time), but please don't hesitate to look to me for feedback (I'm full of opinions) or for help with anything.

Thanks, and have a great New Year's celebration.

Alex Klein
Duke '11

[Joey Baker]

Alex-

Thanks so much for sharing this with us. I'm actually really excited about Dean's point of view. I'm gonna talk with some of the other CoPress team and we'll get back to you ASAP.

Cheers,

____________________

Joey Baker

CoPress Business Development

The Daily Orange

m: 408-220-4221

www.byjoeybaker.com

[Joey Baker]

Alex–

A second update – a few of us CoPress guys have talked, I'll be writing a blog post to address Dean's concerns later today. Again, I want to personally thank you for send the feedback our way, we really appreciate this kind of feedback!

____________________

Joey Baker

CoPress Business Development

The Daily Orange

m: 408-220-4221

www.byjoeybaker.com

On Dec 31, 2008, at 1:03 PM, Alex Klein wrote:

[Rick Martinez]

Hey guys,

I know I haven't been too involved lately (I'm prepping the launch of
a site refresh we're working on), but just wanted to remind you that I
am available as well for feedback and for technical consultations.

Best,
Rick

[Bryan Murley]

Sorry to jump on this so late, but the Duke chronicle is a college
publisher paper right now, so they are already sharing server space
with other papers.

--
Bryan Murley
Director for Innovation
Center for Innovation in College Media
http://www.collegemediainnovation.org/blog
==========
Assistant Professor
Eastern Illinois University

[Joey Baker]

Thanks Bryan–

I should have mentioned here in the Google Group earlier. We've
published a blog post to address Dean's concerns:

http://www.copress.org/2008/12/this-is-reality-checking-in/

Cheers,

-Joey

[Rick Martinez]

Do we have some type of technical committee or something? Cause
there's a lot of more technical responses to Dean's concerns that's
not just "we're in Beta."

Also, it might be worth considering setting up a scalable EC2/S3 setup
that's automated, determined by the traffic that the website is
getting. It's a lot of work but it might be worth it if we really
want to take this hosting thing seriously. Also, I know there will be
papers that will request access to their WP setups so it'd be nice to
give them some type of access that would allow them to poke around and
heavily customize their setup if they know enough to do that and they
just want to use us as a managed host.

*phew* :)

- Rick

[Daniel Bachhuber]

@Rick, to respond to your second point, that's exactly what we intend
to do. I think we'll have to establish some sort of vetting process so
that we don't have to fix too many broken sites, but our intent is to
allow student news orgs to hack at their sites.

--
Daniel Bachhuber
www.danielbachhuber.com
danielb...@gmail.com
cell: +1 971 998 5407
aim/skype/twitter: danielbachhuber

[Joey Baker]

To respond to your first point: Dean's concerns do have technical
answers. I think relevant ones were addressed in the blog post.
Basically: we believe that for the small number of schools we're
hosting, our server will able to handle the load without a problem.

I'm not sure that there is really anything more to be said?

P.s. We should probably move this discussion to the comments on the
blog?

[Rick Martinez]

Oh that's pretty much it. I'd just love to help out in setting up
some type of scalable ecosystem for our hosting since that's one of my
specialties (scaling).

Oh, by the way, happy 2009! :)

[Miles Skorpen]

Rick,

Once we get enough schools to have two or more servers, I imagine
we'll start doing some kind of load balancing for the bigger papers.
For the small ones (like up to 10k uniques a week, maybe?) I don't
really seen the reason to have redundancy.

Also, at the current time, we're going to give our member schools full
access to their WP install (they'll have CPanel—they'll be able to
install whatever they want), but our contract will let them know that
we'll only fix problems relating to our changes or updates as part of
the service.

Miles