Tools and Information to Get Started

Obviously, to tackle these projects, you will need a few tools and some space on a server to host your projects.

Hosting

You will need some space on a server and your own domain name if you don't have one already. There are virtually hundreds of providers out there, all of varying quality and at lots of different price points, but most will give the a similar set of tools. Most hosting services will also set up a domain name for you.

Here are RWW, we host our site on MediaTemple, but their cheapest plan is $20 a month. Others, like GoDaddy, 1and1, or Dreamhost have plans that start at $4 or $5 a month. Obviously, to some degree, you get what you pay for, but to get started, almost every hosting service will do. Just make sure you sign up for a Linux package and not a Windows service, as most of the packages discussed below are meant to run on a Linux server.

For some more in-depth discussion about how hosting works, have a look at this article.

When you sign up with a host, also make sure your hosting package comes with PHP (a programming language almost all open source web projects use), MySQL (a database package to store your data), and the Apache web server.

Most hosting services will give you more than enough space and bandwidth for your personal site (some give you more than 100GB for less than $5 a month). But make sure you look at the details before you sign up. 1GB is not nearly enough disk space if you want to host a photo sharing site.

Moving Files Around: FTP client

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is the easiest method to get files from your desktop to your server. On Windows machines, we recommend Filezilla and SmartFTP (both are available for free). Our Mac users here at RWW like to use Fetch, Cyberduck, and transmit.

Some More Information You Will Need

You host will give you quite a lot of information about your account, but for our projects here, you really only need very little information: ftp username and password; database name, database username, database password. Every database has its own name - your host might give you only one database that all your programs can share (named something like db0212), or you can often add five or more separate databases. Every host does this differently, but usually they provide an easy to use user interface with all the relevant information and some also have very good tutorials.

Installation: Almost Always the Same

Most of the projects mentioned here have awesome tutorials that will get you through the install process. The first time you do this, it might be a bit intimidating, but after you have done it once, you will see that pretty much every installation follows the same pattern and asks for the same information (see above). Most of the time, you will have to edit a text document and enter your database information there. It's really just copy and paste. Some packages also just ask you for this information during the install process.

Note: if you plan on installing more than one software package on your server, make sure you set up a separate directory or sub-domain for each of them!

What to Install

Mixtapes

OpenTape

Want to host your own mixtapes? Give OpenTape a try. Installing OpenTape is a great first project, because you don't even need to configure anything. Download the latest version of the application from here. Unpack it. Upload it to your server with FTP - and that's it. You will set up a user name and password when you first surf to the site and after that, you can easily upload and play your songs.

Blogging

Wordpress

When it comes to hosting your own blog, few packages can trump Wordpress. The install shouldn't take more than 10 minutes and because Wordpress is so popular, literally hundreds of developers are building extensions and themes for it. Make sure you have your database info at hand, as you will have to enter this info into a text file to install Wordpress.

Drupal

Another blogging tool that is more flexible than Wordpress, but also a bit harder to use, is Drupal. The installation, too, is very easy, and Drupal has a highly active developer community and hundreds of addons and themes. For most users, Wordpress does the trick, but if you want to experiment with different blogging platforms, Drupal is a good place to start.

Photo Sharing

Gallery

We like to stay in control of our own photos, and our favorite application to host photos on our own sites is Menalto's Gallery (note, btw, that Wordpress now also has some good features for doing photo-blogs). Gallery is extremely flexible and powerful, but setting up your own page is actually quite easy (the install instructions make it look harder than it is). With Gallery, you can set up and modify your themes, control access to your photos, and thanks to the Gallery Remote, uploading pictures to it is extremely easy.

Lifestream

Sweetcron

We love FriendFeed, but sometimes you don't want to host your own lifestream (it's your life, after all...). That's where Sweetcron comes in. Sweetcron (see an example here), can import your diggs, twitter messages, YouTube favorites, blog posts, etc. and lets you display them on your own site.

Social Network

elgg

Want to host your own social network for a club or class? Elgg is the way to go. While it's a powerful package, installation is as easy as installing Wordpress. Elgg comes with every feature you expect from a social network: profile pages, activity feeds, blogs, forums, bookmarks, etc.

What do You Run On Your Servers?

Do you have your own favorite software packages that you run on your servers? Maybe a wiki, a Digg clone, or a micro-blogging service? Let us know in the comments.

CC-licensed picture of tools was used courtesy of Flickr user flattop341.

Slicehost

Slicehost was founded two years ago and quickly became one of the more popular cloud computing and hosting companies on the Internet. Slicehost's offering are mostly complimentary to Rackspace's services and Slicehost expects to integrate Rackspace's new CloudFiles storage solution in the near future.

Slicehost also announced a number of new features, including the availability of larger 'slices' and lower prices for its high-end offerings.

JungleDisk

By acquiring JungleDisk, Rackspace is now supported by one of the most popular online backup and file storage solutions. Rackspace is planning to integrate JungleDisk into all its products, but it will also continue to support S3.

Challenging Amazon

With these new services, Rackspace is directly competing with Amazon's Web services. The JungleDisk acquisition and the new cloud storage services go up against Amazon's S3, while the Slicehost acquisition competes directly with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud.

Thanks to its established user base, Rackspace is in a good position to challenge Amazon's cloud computing services and, if anything, it is good to see that the competition in this space is heating up.

Disclosure: Rackspace is a RWW sponsor.

At this time, there are only three applications available in the new hosted format:

• LimeSurvey, Survey Application: Documentation, SourceForge.net Project Page
• MediaWiki, Wiki Application: Documentation, Reference Manual
• phpBB, Forum Application: Documentation

However, any existing application can now be enabled as a hosted app, too. This can be done from the new "Hosted Apps" Project Admin page, a link to which can be found under the "Admin" project navigation menu.

According to Ross Turk, director of community at SourceForge, "developers can be much more productive when they don't have to worry about maintaining their infrastructure, and this new offering allows them to use the tools they know and like without the burden of maintaining them."

Benefits Of Hosted Apps

This service was actually launched quietly a few weeks ago, as SourceForge insiders may already know. The announcement was then made via a forum posting which clued in members to the new service. But since the news only hit the mainstream channels today, we imagine this means that they're now ready for primetime.

That earlier announcement touted several benefits to using Hosted Apps, including the following:

• Eliminates the overhead of deploying supported applications; simply opt-in and begin using the application right away. No need to deal with config files and install procedures.
• Served from a dedicated database and web server pool, separate from the project web servers -- so you don't need to cope with the security limitations of project web's shared hosting environment, or project web's outbound mail and connectivity restrictions.
• They maintain the application code for Hosted Apps and will deploy updates as they become available from the vendor. This should reduce the risk from vulnerabilities found in the Hosted Apps and eliminate a major administrative burden (installing updates) to projects.
• They perform regular backups of the Hosted Apps data, but also provide you the ability to easily make application backups on-demand.
• They perform application testing, tuning and monitoring to ensure Hosted Apps operate properly. If service faults occur, they respond and fix the issues. If defects are found in the application (either through our own testing or through end-user report), they will repair the defects or raise the defect to the vendor for repair.
• All Hosted Apps make use of our centralized authentication infrastructure (users login with their SourceForge.net usernames and passwords) but retain the permissions (authorization) of the application (so, for example, existing users of MediaWiki will find permissions handling exactly as they expect).
• Since this offering is centrally managed, any improvements they make either to the infrastructure or to the Hosted Apps themselves will immediately become available to all projects. The Hosted Apps offering reduces their overhead for adding major new functionality to their offering, since all applications share common integration points and common infrastructure.
• Since Hosted Apps are available under an Open Source license, this centralized service has the potential to rapidly increase the user base of Open Source applications and drive high quality feedback for the further improvement of those applications.

Sweetcron is a self-hosted service, so you will need access to a server with PHP and MySQL running on it. After downloading the code, the install is pretty typical for that of self-hosted application. It's a bit more complicated than installing Wordpress or OpenTape, because you have to enter your data in numerous places and you have to edit your .htaccess when you want to install Sweetcron in a sub-directory.However, if you just follow the steps in the documentation, you should be able to install Sweetcron in less than 10 minutes.

After this, you just start adding your RSS feeds, and you are ready to go.

Final Result

The lifestream itself looks and works just like you would expect it, with a number of little surprises. One of the nicest features of Sweetcron is that it can format every new entry according to where it came from. A digg item, for example, gets a blue background, a Flickr items shows the photo on a green background with the caption underneath, and Twitter posts show in a blue box with your avatar in the top left corner (as long as you uploaded your avatar into the right spot in Sweetcron's directory structure).

By default, Sweetcron updates your stream every 30 minutes, but you can also set the cron service on your server to update more frequently.

You can write your own posts in Sweetcron as well, but the editor doesn't handle anything else but pure text and HTML code.

Bring Your Own Services

As of now, Sweetcron only creates your lifestream - if you want to add comments, Sweetcron recommends you install Disqus, and if you want to have a contact form on your site, it recommends you head over to wufoo to create one.

The two default themes are nice, especially the "Boxy but Good" one you can see in the screenshots here. Over time, others will surely start developing more themes and hacking the existing themes doesn't seem too hard.

Verdict

Sweetcron does exactly what it promises to do. It is important to note, though, that this is not a Friendfeed-in-a-box type service. Your lifestream stands completely separate from every other Sweetcron service (though you could create a master feed for a group by patching all the RSS feeds together and running them through another Sweetcron installation).

For those who just want to have a lifestream on their blog, for example, Sweetcron is a great solution, especially if you don't mind hacking Sweetcron to fit your own needs.

There are, of course, various other self-hosted applications that have a similar feature set (see Mark Krysnky's list here), and many of them come as Wordpress plugins, making their installation very easy. Few, though, give you the flexibility of Sweetcron.

So far only Amazon of the big web companies have opened their hosting architecture up to outsiders, but a number of smaller players have tapped into the growing market for cloud based hosting solutions. Mosso's platform seeks to match the scaling power of a compute cloud with the ease and simplicity of a shared hosting environment.

Unlike competitors such as Joyent or Amazon, Mosso's system does not offer customers root level access to their servers. Instead, servers are preconfigured with a range of software options and are fully managed similar to a shared hosting environment. Keeping their hosting platform standardized is what allows them to easily monitor and scale the service as needed. For example, last week Mosso experienced a significant spike in load on its PHP cluster and added 10 servers without customers noticing, company executives told me.

Today, Mosso is announcing a new payment scheme that they feel is an industry first for a cloud computing platform. According to Mosso, scaling on Amazon or other compute cloud options means adding more instances, which means you're still paying on a server by server basis. Mosso's new pay structure is based 100% on requests, which they feel is more accurate in terms of charging you only for the resources you use.

Mosso's pay structure starts with a base fee of $100 per month, with a rate of $0.25 per gigabyte of bandwidth, and $0.50 per gigabyte of storage. They also charge $0.03 per 1000 requests with 3 million included. Being charged per gig on bandwidth and storage is a familiar pricing structure for anyone on shared hosting or a managed server.

The company is also announcing an updated control panel and will soon roll out a MySQL backup utility that will take automatic snapshots of databases down to the table level. That sort of utility wouldn't be possible on EC2, according to Mosso, because every instance is configured differently.

Note: Due to a miscommunication on our part we briefly ran this story yesterday on our web site when in fact the new Mosso pricing plan was not going live until today (February 19). We apologize for any confusion this caused.