Sorry meant to reply to the list! Ours is hosted remotely. No problems, aside from the time a BMW took out the junction box on the corner and we lost the Internet connection for two days. But it certainly pays to have someone knowledgeable check out the fine print of the contract and etc. to make sure it suits your needs and that you have the access you require. Elaine On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 5:58 PM, MJ Ray <mjr@phonecoop.coop> wrote:

"Christine Othitis" <cothitis@telus.net>

...

The problem is that the server was donated as well as the tech support. Koha was running until the server locked up, and then my husband worked his techie magic and updated Ubuntu. We still have to configure Koha again for it to work. The drive is very old and making ticking sounds - so - not an ideal situation.

Are there any downsides to using a hosted Linux solution for Koha? The major upside I can see right now is tech support being a phone call away :-D

The biggest downsides are that some providers try to lock your data in and not let you get a database dump whenever you want (to stop you moving elsewhere easily), that command-line access usually costs extra (because security has to be that bit tighter, making other work slightly more difficult) and that the servers are usually in datacentres so if they make ticking sounds, no-one will hear over the air con! Of course, SMART and other server tools should warn us before a disk fails, and the disks are RAIDed so should continue even if a disk fails, but even so, a few times over the last ten years we've ended up deploying new servers based on backups... and you can't assume that providers are making those backups, as we've discovered at least once before (but we had our own because we're fairly paranoid).

This isn't really Koha-specific though, so probably any good Buyer's Guide to hosted web apps will be a good guide.

Also, you can have tech support a phone call away even with your own server, if you choose an appropriate provider.

Hope that informs, -- MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op. http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer. In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/ _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list http://koha-community.org Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha

-- Elaine Bradtke Data Wrangler VWML English Folk Dance and Song Society | http://www.efdss.org Cecil Sharp House, 2 Regent's Park Road, London NW1 7AY Tel +44 (0) 20 7485 2206 (This number is for the English Folk Dance and Song Society in London, England. If you wish to phone me personally, send an e-mail first. I work off site) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Registered Company No. 297142 Charity Registered in England and Wales No. 305999 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture" --Elvis Costello (Musician magazine No. 60 (October 1983), p. 52) -- Elaine Bradtke Data Wrangler VWML English Folk Dance and Song Society | http://www.efdss.org Cecil Sharp House, 2 Regent's Park Road, London NW1 7AY Tel +44 (0) 20 7485 2206 (This number is for the English Folk Dance and Song Society in London, England. If you wish to phone me personally, send an e-mail first. I work off site) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Registered Company No. 297142 Charity Registered in England and Wales No. 305999 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture" --Elvis Costello (Musician magazine No. 60 (October 1983), p. 52)