Webhosting: financial supporet and recommendations for opensiddur.org

[Aharon Varady]

After many years hosted at Datarealm Inc., I think it's time to find a new webhost. Our shared hosting plan has not kept the site online reliably, and our account is constantly under-resourced for the amount of DB requests it makes for the traffic it receives.

I'd also like to get the site hosted through community support. Currently, I pay for the site out-of-pocket from funds generated from small donations and from the sale of our open-source siddurim at Dimus Parrhesia Press. If you'd like to become a patron of the Open Siddur Project, please make your donation here:

https://patreon.com/opensiddur

When I started a website for opensiddur.org (then opensiddur.net) back in 2009, it was mainly as a blog for reporting development of the web application that Efraim Feinstein and Azriel Fasten were then collaborating on. Datarealm was a webhost I was long familiar with since it was while working there, back in 2001/2, that I had the idea for an Open Siddur. (I was learning PERL and MySQL at the time.)

Fast forward to 2018 and none of my old friends work there or in tech support, so I have no quality connection there to reach out to when something breaks. I've given the new ownership a shot, but I'm not satisfied that they may be any better than any other outfit, and since I haven't shopped around, there may very well be a better alternative.

If you have a favorite webhost that you think is right for us, you can reply here (to share your knowledge with the community) or respond privately if you prefer.

Moving forward will mean a site move of an account with multiple domains (all wordpress CMS), and hopefully not much downtime. Anyone with skills who loves and cares for the Open Siddur Project is invited to join a sysadmin team capable of working on this.

Aharon

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Aharon Varady
Founding Director, shamesh
the Open Siddur Project
https://opensiddur.org

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Pronouns: He/him/his