[GRLUG] Cloud VMs, Hosting, & CMSs [Was: NOT LINUX - broadband]

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> >> > The vast majority of people don't want to host their content from their
> >> > house.  It is just too inconvenient;  there is a wonderful economy of
> >> > scale for data-centers.
> >> > But I do want control - the VM-cloud (vs. the Google-Amazon-Cloud
> >> > [thinly veiled vendor-lock-in-cloud]) provides the best of both worlds.
> >> Perhaps.  I'm of the mind that I'd like to have more say over whose
> >> hands touch the hardware my system sits on,
> > Ah, I'm a sys-admin.  If I never had to touch hardware again I'd be
> > thrilled. :)  I just want my services portable.
> I love mucking with hardware, but that's unrelated. 

Oh, I enjoy mucking with it.  I don't enjoy *supporting* it!   It will
inevitably fail on a Friday afternoon, during month-end, or as I'm
wrapping up a large project.

>  My thought is
> that the fewer people who have access to the database containing my
> users' preferences, password blobs and email addresses, the better.
> I've been offered free hosting in a couple different places, one on an
> otherwise *unused* machine with four logical Xeon cores and 16GB of
> RAM, but I don't know the people who offered well enough to trust them
> with that data. (With my daily full, versioned remote backups,
> restoring the site to another server after a server takeover would be
> nearly trivial, but still...)

An understandable position.  Just as an Admin and not a Developer I'd be
less prone to worry about that - there is so much more low hanging
fruit.

> Granted, I'm far more likely to be nailed by a Wordpress or MediaWiki
> hack, but there's not much I can do about that without dropping those
> applications. (Though I am planning to switch away from WP.)

Do you find WP to be breach prone?  I haven't working with either of
these.  

Have you ever looked at Concrete5? <http://www.concrete5.org/>

I did run a Drupal site for awhile and the stream of updates was just
unbearable - and given the general code quality I think security updates
to Drupal are pretty much just treading water.