Give Camp Hosting and CMS Options

December 06 2010

The National Day of Give Camp is a little over a month away, and analysis is beginning for the camps this weekend. Additionally, there are a number of other camps throughout the year. As you’d expect, there is a great deal of support for Give Camps from the Microsoft ecosystem. ComponentOne is a sponsor of Give Camps both nationally and locally. On a national level, we’re providing our Studio Enterprise for teams and non-profits who utilize our controls. On a local level, we’re providing swag and funds to make the weekends a success (if you’re running a give camp, drop me a line).

Project types cover a wide range of needs, but the most common is perhaps a website. If the deliverable includes a website, one of the first decisions a team needs to make is the foundation—where to host, and what CMS to use. There are three hosts to choose from—Verio, DiscountASP.NET and Applied Innovations. I haven’t had any experience with Verio, but I’ve had client websites on Applied Innovations for about 10 years now, and client and my personal site on DiscountASP.NET for a little over five years now. Both have been outstanding in terms of reliability and cost/features (not that cost matters for the non-profits).

DiscountASP.NET

DiscountASP.NET has its own control panel to manage websites, which I like a lot. To me, it’s well organized and logically arranged.

A number of third-party applications have been successfully installed; you can find a partial list at http://support.discountasp.net/KB/a383/applications-that-have-been-successfully-installed.aspx?KBSearchID=230421.

DiscountASP.NET has one-click installation for a number of popular applications:

BlogEngine.NET
DasBlog
DotNetNuke Community Edition
Kentico CMS for ASP.NET
Kooboo CMS
mojoPortal
My Web Pages Starter Kit
Gallery Server Pro
Amplifeeder
ScrewTurn Wiki 3.0

I also have installed WordPress on a couple of sites, and it takes about 10 minutes tops. If you want to deploy files via FTP, I’ve found FileZilla to be the best FTP program with DiscountASP.NET. Other FTP programs hold connections open, making directory removal or renaming difficult.

Besides our Give Camp related promotion, ComponentOne has a partnership with DiscountASP.NET where their customer receive out Menu and Toolbar components for free; see http://www.componentone.com/SuperPages/ASPNETControlsGiveaway/ for more information.

Applied Innovations (AppliedI)

AppliedI uses the very popular Helm control panel. A lot of people love this control panel, but I’m not one. It’s not organized how I think—to each their own. Helm is not short of features, and probably gives you greater control over your hosting account than DiscountASP.NET’s. In 2005, AppliedI withstood a direct hit from Hurricane Wilma (Category 3) with only a few hours of downtime.

AppliedI supports a number of “Application Packs”, which offer one-click installation of many popular third party applications. Some of these I would put in the “oldie-but-goodie” category, but popular apps like WordPress, Joomla and Kentico are supported.

ASP Poll (http://www.toddwoolums.com/asppoll.asp)
Asp Simple Online Photo Album
Community Server 2008.5
DasBlog
DNN 3
DNN 4
FlexWiki
Graffiti CMS
Joomla 1.0.11
Kentico CMS Lite
Mambo 4.6
nopCommerce
BV Commerve V
WordPress

Web Platform Installer

We’re not limited to the one-click apps; all three hosts are fully compatible with the apps found in the Web Platform Installer (http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/Categories.aspx). The WebPI is full of great applications; the one trick is, a lot of these will need to be installed locally, uploaded to the host, and then installation completed. In my experience, it hasn’t been difficult to do--I’ve worked with DotNetNuke, Umbraco CMS, nopCommerce, BlogEngine.NET, DasBlog, mojoPortal, Gallery Server Pro and ScrewTurn Wiki in this manner, and I was able to get every app up and running with very little work. They all have installation wizards, but require some configuration information you can look up in the control panel.

One final security note!

Regardless of your host and app choice, remember to change the default passwords, disable or remove demo user accounts, and delete the installation wizards when you’re done.

MESCIUS inc.