Plone Hosting

I host with Webfaction. For a single, small Plone (2.5) site, you need at least 120MB of RAM. I have a few small sites, and use their Shared 3 plan, with 160MB, which costs about $22.50/month (as of November 2008).

Responses to tickets takes about a day, and they're fairly responsive on their discussion forum.

Creating Blank Plone Sites

Next, I used the ZMI to create the specific Plone site(s). Once they were created, I logged into them as an admin and set up the email addresses used for email from my Plone sites. This is important so that they can send passwords to users as they register.

I ran into a minor snag setting up the site email. You have to set this in two places: Site Setup/Portal Setup, in the 'Site From Address' field, and Site Setup/Mail Settings. If you don't set the From Address, it won't be able to send registration emails. As it turns out, you can use any domain name you'd like, even fake ones, but not Localhost.

Domain Name

I used GoDaddy to get a couple of domain names, and pointed them to WebFaction's DNS servers.

Then I used the WebFaction control panels to map the domain names and subdomains to my Zope server. There's a video that walks you through the process. Here's a rundown:

• Set up the domains in the Webfaction control, like 'example.com' and the subdomains, like 'www.example.com' and 'pcf.example.com'. If you don't set up the domains, you'll get a "Server not found" error when you try to access them.
• Set up the sites in the Webfaction control, like a site named 'example' with the 'example.com' and 'www.example.com' subdomains associated with it. If you don't set up the site and subdomain, you'll get the "Site not configured" error when you try to access them.
  

The third step is to use the ZMI Virtual Host Monster to map the domain names and subdomains to your Plone sites.

• Add two lines like 'www.example.com/myPloneExample' and 'example.com/myPloneExample' to point to your 'myPloneExample' Plone site. If you don't do this, you'll reach the "Zope Quick Start" page when you try to access the domain.
  

Email

Setting up email was mostly straight-forward. You create mailboxes, then email addresses, then map the email addresses to the mailboxes. There's a video that explains it and it's done through their control panel.

I found creating generic email addresses attracted an overwhelming amount of spam.

You might create:

postmaster -- So users can post to mailing lists

xxxweb (instead of webmaster, admin, help, abuse, spam) -- To receive mail about the website

xxxinfo (instead of info) -- To receive mail about anything

xxxcalendar (instead of events) -- To receive mail about things to add to the calendar

xxxnews -- To receive mail about the mailing list. If you create a mailing list, have xxx-news-owner forward to this.

I like to have all email to these addresses forward to the appropriate owner, and also copy to a special administrative account. This gives me an audit trail.

If you're using a .com address, and you've also bought the .org or other domains, create an autoresponder directing people to the correct domain.

If you're using IMAP and are migrating your email, you'll lose any information that is in your folders, even if they're marked for off-line use. There are some migration steps here that need to be researched for the next time, because I lost a lot of mail in the move. (Local folders are preserved, but apparently off-line folders and local folders are not the same thing.)