[Dancer-users] Dancer deployment still confusing, difficult and a non-starter

[P Kishor]

On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 4:53 AM, sukria <sukria at sukria.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 31 Jul 2010 11:38:39 -0500, P Kishor <punk.kish at gmail.com> wrote:
>> First, the perldancer.org domain was out for several days and emails
>> to dancer-users mailing would bounce back ("rejected by recipient
>> domain"). A conversation on IRC channel revealed that the DNS server
>> was down, but nothing could be done about it until Sukrieh returned
>> from a vacation. Would it be possible to not have such a single point
>> of failure or blocking in the canonical, root domain of the web
>> framework please? It gives the impression that the project has been
>> abandoned.
>
> Indeed, I was off for two weeks with no connection available around me
> (was on vacation in Spain) and the server where all my personal projects
> are hosted went down during this time. That's bad luck.
>
> I'm aware that gives a negative impression over the all project and people
> involved with it (developers and users), and for that I sincerly apologize.
> But you have to remind that Dancer is a free software project, built upon
> goodwill and freetime, and with no income money at all. That means that we
> might not have the very best hosting architecture, 24/7 supervision and all
> what you could expect from a company.

Yes, of course, and I (and I am sure others) are very grateful to you
for creating this really great framework and putting it out in open
source.

I guess, the key is, now that others are discovering how lovely Dancer
can be, it might be worthwhile investigating how to make its hosting a
bit more robust.

One easy way would be to host it at a location where more than one
person has control over the DNS or other aspects that might go down
from time to time. That way, if one person is away for an extended
period of time, and something goes wrong, there is at least one
backup.

If you are looking for reliable DNS, OpenDNS (or even Google's DNS)
might be an option to consider. For mailing lists, Google Groups might
be an option.

If you are looking for a free or inexpensive web host, once again, any
one of the shared hosts might be an option. Here in the US, I can get
a shared host for less than $10 a month with complete shell access. In
fact, I would contend that putting perldancer.org on a shared host
might be instructive anyway to iron out the kinks of hosting
Dancer-based web sites on a shared host.

I believe github too allows hosting a web site.

Anyway, the point is -- this is a great project, and it would be worth
while making its mailing list and web site more robust. And, it would
most likely be somewhere between free and very inexpensive.




-- 
Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org
Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org
Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org
Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/kishor
Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu
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