[Koha] Hosted Linux solution for Koha?

[MJ Ray]

"Christine Othitis" <cothitis at 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/