[wplug-internet] PaaS, instead of Hosting? -- New Linode upgrade available

Bryan J Smith b.j.smith at ieee.org
Mon Apr 28 14:34:46 EDT 2014


On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 1:38 PM, Pat Barron <pat at lectroid.com> wrote:
> One thing that really presented a problem when I looked at Heroku (which
> still seems to be the case today) was that we host and manage our own
> mailing lists, and I didn't see any mailing list management solutions at
> all in Heroku.

I purposely said mailing lists are poor for PaaS, and something else
would need to be used.  But there are free mailing list servers out
there.  So there's no reason the web site and mailing lists can't be
on separate servers under the same domain.  ;)

> If we moved to a PaaS model (at least, as I said, when I
> was looking at Heroku), we'd probably have to get someone else to host
> our mailing lists, such as moving them into Google Groups or something,
> which we don't really want to do.

There are a lot of options.  Mail and other things can really suck up
a lot of storage, let alone they are common attack or misuse vectors.
So I've worked with a lot of groups who decided long ago to stop
running their own mail servers.

Heck, I haven't run my own in almost a decade for this reason.  ;)

> Plus, maybe it's sort of old-school of me, but to me it just feels wrong
> if I don't have a shell prompt, and can't arbitrarily type "yum
> install", or even "make ; make install" to make it do whatever we want.  ;-)

So you want a hosting provider.  Nothing wrong with that.

> Your point is well taken, though, that some kind of PaaS could be used
> as a prototyping platform for a revamped web site, particularly since
> PaaS providers like Heroku and OpenShift do offer a small instance for free.

Exactly.

-- bjs


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