Sidebar - Goodies or Necessities Relational Databases: Most ZHP's will bundle a certain amount of MySQL or PostgreSQL databases with their packages. If you want to store your data in a relational database you will want to pay attention to this. Actions: in CMF are usually presented to the user in an action box. In Plone these actions are presented as green tabs just above the content area. Each action has a title, an expression that is evaluated to generate a URL (the action target), a condition expression that can be used to select which users are able to see the action, a permission and a category. Common categories include 'object', 'folder', 'user', and 'portal'. Backups / Site Monitoring: Don't forget to ask about what kind of backup services the ZHP has. Are backups included? If so, how often and are they kept offsite? Will the ZHP provide software monitoring so that you will be informed should your Zope site go down. Tools: What tools are installed with your instance or Private Zope Server? Examples: Reportlab and xpdf for generating dynamic PDF documents. CVS/Subversion for tracking software changes. Typical Questions to ask: How much memory is allocated? Amount of hard disk space? What tools are installed and ready for you to use? How much support, if any, is included with the hosting account? Does the hosting company make an effort to give back to the community? List of Zope Hosting Providers You can find a list of companies that offer Zope Hosting on opensourcexperts

So you have built a fantastic Zope- or Plone- based Web application for yourself or for a customer and are ready to share it with the world?

Unless you:

• have a permanent leased line (or equivalent) connection to the internet; or
• have your own computer (server) hosted with an Internet Service Provider

you will have to work with a Zope/Plone Hosting Provider.

This is not a bad thing, as from this author's experience Zope/Plone Hosting Providers (we will call them ZHP's for short) are generally a friendly group of people. They take care of system administrative tasks like keeping your Zope server up and running, reading up on the latest security risks and installing / updating systems so that they remain as secure as possible.

A well- run Zope Hosting Provider saves you hours of time every month. Especially when you consider that most hosting packages also include mail server services which allow you to set up a certain number amount of email accounts with the ZHP. With the seemingly exponential growth of spam maintaining a mail server alone can become a full- time job.

Like any business enterprise, ZHP's like any business enterprises are always looking to differentiate themselves by offering unique services so it will not always be possible for ZopeMag or you to make a feature- by- feature comparison. But since we have to start somewhere these are the three different Zope packages typically offered by ZHP's world-wide:

• Free Zope Hosting
• Shared Instance Hosting
• Private Zope Server

Originally pioneered by Nip LTD (before Chris Withers left them to start another company) there are now two major providers of "free" Zope hosting accounts.

• http://www.freezope.org
• http://www.objectis.org

All Free Zope Hosting accounts are shared instance accounts, which means that you share a single Zope server along with whatever number of other users the ZHP gives access to.

Free Zope Hosting accounts are great for trying out your ZPT/DTML skills and some of the most popular products (including, if offfered, Plone) but they do come with lots of limitations including:

• no installation of 3rd party Zope or Plone products (you're at the mercy of the ZHP);
• you can not install any of your self-developed products;
• you are not allowed to run a commercial or client site using the free hosting provider's site.

In other words, Free Zope Hosting is great for learning a bit about the standard Zope products like Formulator or Plone and of course, for testing your DTML/ZPT's, but if you are doing anything serious you are going to need a package that will cost you some money.

One of the coolest things about Zope is its object-oriented delegation model. If you want to give someone within your organization an area to work in without affecting your files, set up. a folder with an acl_user folder and give that person a login and password then and they can do what ever they want within their folder without affecting your setup. Everybody is king of their domain.

That's exactly how Shared Instance Hosting works except for the ZHP gives you a folder within a Zope instance to work with. You are in effect sharing a Zope server with a number of other users chosen by your ZHP. But the difference to Free Zope Hosting is that, because you are paying for the service you shouldn't have any limitations regarding commercial projects or content. You should also be able to map a regular .com, .net, .org domain to your folder via the built-in Virtual Host Monster and be able to import .zexp files.

If there is a product you really want the ZHP to install you can expect some flexibility as long as the software is isn't known to have lots of bugs (such as a memory leak -- which could bring down the Zope server).

You might want to ask the hosting company about the hardware they use and how many shared accounts they put on each server.

You have your very own private Zope Server if you have access to the Control Panel and can develop and install your own Zope Products. This means that you can also connect to the physical machine that your Zope server resides on and can work directly on the machine via Secure Shell (SSH), Secure Copy (SCP) and Secure FTP (SFTP).

If you are serious about writing Python products or if you need to run Zope products not available to shared instance customers, this is the type of Zope Hosting package you will need.

But if you are just learning Zope Page Templates and Python Scripts a free or Shared Instance Hosting package may be enough to start with.

Note that there are variations of the packages described above. For example, in addition to your own Zope Sserver the ZHP might give you a FreeBSD Jail instance. FreeBSD Jails give you not just your own Zope server but a virtual Ffile system (several FreeBSD Jail instances can run on one machine) including root access for your part of the server. This allows you to install pretty much any kind of software you can think of -- not just Zope Products. These two companies provide this service:

• imeme.net
• zettai.net

For a more complete list of Zope Hosting companies visit this filtered Index on opensourcexperts.

And of course if you want to build your own machine most Zope hosting companies will be happy to give it a home in one of their server racks.