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Thursday 27 May 2004 6:42:51 pm
Our story, for now. Hoping it helps someone. We're located in NYC and are developing two sites, one for our own use, and one for client use, with more client sites to follow. (No users' group in NYC, I guess? anyone here interested?) CMS, Linux, php and MySQL are all new to us - okay, we do use Mozilla! Sure pleased to have found EZ Publish, after making our way through a number of other good but lesser CMS's: Typo3, Plone, Xaraya, and so. Up front EZP sounded maybe too much of a toughie; that is not our experience. We tested in V3.3 but were even more pleased to find we could start developing (sorry nothing online yet) with V3.4 (first beta1 and now beta2). V3.4 really knocked our socks off. Like Christmas in there. We sure want EZ Systems to gain from the success of these sites so we will look hard at their training and Q&A deals as we feel our way forward. We originally thought hosting would be the easy one. We started by attempting to install on our existing Windows/IIS host space in Phoenix; many hours of struggle there and no outcome; just don't try it folks. Then we set up Linux hosting in Marland; more hours of struggle. Here the problem was that PHP was in CGI mode, so we could run no accelerator, and control was minimal. We terminated this deal because of extreme site slowness. We compared our speed with many other EZP sites by googling "powered by EZ Publish" and bookmarking each site into a Fast or a Slow group. Quite a range of speed revealed here; some EZP sites do whistle. Enough was enough. We googled everything we could find on hosting for EZP, shortlisted three widely recommended hosters in the US and UK, put questions to each of them, and then settled on http://www.visionwt.com in the UK for our flagship site, and http://www.firebright.com/ in Sacramento, California (right where our client group is) on the basis of what we got back. We are having to move faster with the client site, and so there is more to share here now on Firebright. We chose their $37 a month option for starters; highly competive for space and bandwidth. They have an awesomely fast setup, and within an hour of the online application we were loaded up (V3.4 beta/2) and running. The control panel would take a lot than this forum space to fully describe: we thought our IIS people http://www.crystaltech.com/ in Phoenix had the ultimate control panel. But Firebright's made us laugh, it is so stuffed. Finally, here is how Jonathan of Firebright answered our questions; I hope he won't mind (similar fine comeback from WisionWT; the third hoster left us cold though) as these paras really clinched things for us. *** Hi there - Here are the answers to your questions... 1) Yes, [on php] it's native mode (compiled). Actually, you have your own installation (as in complete instance) of apache. You actually have your own server for eZ Publish. 2) We actually include Zend Accelertor free of charge (normally it's 800 bucks) with our accounts. You don't get a copy of the software to install, but it is installed on your specific account (we have special licensing with Zend -- it's very cool). I think you'll find Zend is a heck of a lot better than Turck in terms of real speed increase. 3) [yes] you can have command line access. Understand, each account is not hosted on a control panel per-se. Each account is it's own little Linux server, completely isolated. To most people, it looks just like a real dedicated server. You can request root access if you need it, but you most certainly can get in there via SSH and access mysql from the command line, etc. It's about a billion times better for developers than most web hosting accounts. You'll like. Me promise. ;-) *** Yes Jonathan. So far we sure do.
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