Hi all, JP Moresmau recently sent me an email asking for recommendations on hosting a Yesod app. I think a number of you have heard me mention the idea of setting up a WAI web hosting system (code named Lambda Engine). I think it's time to start hitting this idea hard, and I'd like community involvement as much as possible. I think we have two extremes we can approach this from: at the one end, we can provide a complete hosting solution, similar to Heroku[1]. People would simply "cabal sdist" their project, type "lambda-engine upload mytarball.tar.gz" and their site would be live. Lambda Engine would automatically handle database server configuration, DNS setup, and so on. At the other extreme, we could simply provide a set of shell scripts for setting up a vanilla Ubuntu (or Debian, or Cent, or FreeBSD...) install to support compiling a WAI application, provide an nginx setup, etc. The user would be responsible- and have the freedom to- set up his/her own server however he/she wants. There are lots of in-between points on that spectrum. For example, I was thinking of perhaps providing a central compilation server that everyone could use. In my experience, Haskell applications take very few resources to run, but actually building the things take a while. Compiling on a local system and then uploading is painful because (1) you have to deal with architecture issues and (2) you might have a slow upload speed. Anyway, I'm very interested to hear what other people think about all this. I'll enumerate a bunch of random thoughts on this topic: * Should this be a for-profit venture, bankrolled by a few members, or a community, non-profit approach? (I'm favoring the latter.) * If we decide to provide some serious hosting power, we might be able to make a deal with a hosting provider, stating that we're representing the "entire Haskell web community". * I don't really think this needs to be WAI specific: assuming we just use reverse HTTP proxies, this will work for any app that uses standalone hosting. We could also support FastCGI if we wanted. * Remember that Amazon is now providing a free tier, which provides a micro EC2 instance (available as either 32 or 64 bit). I think the micro instance should be sufficient for running a few web apps, nginx and PostgreSQL. * Since starting up and shutting down instances is so easy with Amazon, we could provide both a "web host" image and a "Haskell compiler" image. The web host could automatically start up a compiler instance as needed. * Are we going to provide email sending support, with all of the complications of dealing with spam lists, or simply offload to external services (like Amazon SES[2])? * Does anyone have a good recommendation on who to use as a host? Michael [1] http://heroku.com/ [2] http://aws.amazon.com/ses/