Hosting

Availability

We recommend WebLion Hosting to all our partners: it saves money and time for both parties and yields a more robust site to boot. You can be up and running in our environment in a few hours to a few days. Contact us to get the ball rolling!

Advantages

While Plone is fairly simple to install for development work—on a laptop, for instance—setting up a production-worthy environment is a complex undertaking. We’ve taken care of installation and configuration, routine upgrades, backups, database maintenance, Penn State authentication, and more, saving you weeks of system administration time initially and even more down the road. Sure, you could go elsewhere for Plone hosting or even raw virtual machines, but nobody matches our combination of performance, flexibility, and knowledge of both the Plone stack and the Penn State environment. And you have nothing to lose: nothing stops you from picking up your installation and going elsewhere if you’re anything less than thrilled.

Features

Performance

• A dedicated gigabyte of RAM for your site, 50GB of SAN storage, and 3GHz of Xeon cycles on a VMWare ESX cluster. Storage and RAM can be upped as necessary, and more machines can be added for more speed.
• Squid caching—the same that powers Wikipedia and Facebook—capable of serving hundreds of hits per second
• Your own Zope instance that is never shared with other customers. This means you get to choose the add-on products you need, without being held hostage by the limitations of other sites or your hosting provider.

Fault tolerance

• Access to our Zenoss monitoring, alerting, and trend graphing system. We monitor every part of the stack—Zope, ZEO, Squid, Apache, and even front page response time—as well as machine-wide resources such as CPU and RAM, and you can opt to receive email alerts (like we do) if anything goes awry.
• Redundant routes to the Penn State backbone
• Transparent migration of your virtual server from machine to machine to spread load and respond to hardware failures
• 24/7 support for the already-redundant hardware
• Nightly tape backups to save your skin in case someone makes a non-undoable mistake on your site or a volcano erupts under the storage array

Up-to-dateness

• The Debian Linux operating system, drawing on the expertise of the world-class Debian security team and using our own package respository for Plone-related goodies
• Nightly automatic additions of features and fixes, thanks to MIT’s config-package-dev framework and our own auto-updater package

Still curious? Our WebLion Hosting wiki page and administration guide give more technical details. Or hop on IRC and ask your question.

Pricing

More details and terms of service are included in the WebLion Services Overview, available on request.

Ready to go live?

Please give us 2 weeks’ notice, via a ticket, before you open a new site to the public. We’ll clear our calendars to help you over any last-minute hurdles so your planned launch goes off without a hitch.