Bluehost or PKP Hosting

[reflections]

Hello, I'm new to the forum. I'm the newly appointed editor of Reflections: Narratives of Professional Helping, an 18-year old beloved journal that had to cease publishing due to budget cuts in the California State U. system. Now another CSU (Cleveland State U.) will publish the journal online and I'll serve as editor. Unfortunately, other than some course release and grad assistant, we have no funding to speak of yet (although we do have an online way for folks to donate to Friends of Reflections and have just enough to get a year or two of www.bluehost.com. Ideally, we'd try to raise enough funds at a conference I'm attending week after next to afford a year of the basic hosting with PKP. I'm fairly computer literate, use Dreamweaver and so forth. I'm hoping to be able to report honestly to my colleagues about whether we really need to raise the funds for PKP hosting or can try to do it ourselves. The only bell and whistle we want is to use robots.txt to screen out the creepy crawlers, since our journal's content is such that we don't want it entirely Open Access; we want to require a free subscription process and restrict indexing on Google for a variety of reasons having to do with the nature of the content. So, what do you think, can I hack it? (:{ - Mike Dover

[asmecher]

Hi Mike,

The trickiest part of managing an OJS install will probably be the occasional upgrade or security patch. (See e.g. docs/UPGRADE in your installation for details). If you can manage those kinds of things, then I'd say you're prepared to save a little bit of cash and host on your own.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[reflections]

Thanks Alec. I've received some good advice from Kevin as well. Do you know of other journals now using Bluehost.com or can you recommend another external hosting source known to work with OJS? I'll be using OCS as well, our conference (separate from the journal) already has a bluehost.com account. - Mike

[asmecher]

Hi Mike,

Most commercial PHP hosts are well-suited for OJS, although I can't promise any specifics as every host is a little different. If you're already running OCS on Bluehost without trouble, then OJS should run just as well since they share a lot of code.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[reflections]

I've just been in touch with one journal that loves bluehost and has been using it with OJS for years.

[asmecher]

Hi Mike,

Thanks, that's useful to know.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[reflections]

Another forum member private messaged me that he has been using OCS on bluehost (not OJS):

"It basically worked pretty well out-of-the-box, but it does get a bit confusing for users and administrators. If you can find someone who has installed PHP packages before, like WordPress, PHPBB, Drupal, or something like that, you shouldn't have any problems. They could probably do a basic install and configuration for you in an afternoon. Someone who's installed this before could probably do it in an hour. If you're not familiar with PHP and haven't set up your own MySQL database before, this is probably out of reach. You have to upload the files, configure the system, and create a MySQL database to get it running. On top of that, if you want to customize the look and feel, you'll want to get into the code."

I've not done PHP or MySQL but I'm confident that there are manuals that will help guide me. - Mike

[reflections]

Colleagues, here I was so excited to be Editor of a journal in my field, which is social work and sociology, not computer science! SPSS, bring it on, but these instructions?

http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/README

OMG.

We are either going to have to raise the bucks to have it hosted at PKP or find a consultant or someone to help. Any suggestions?

Mike

[asmecher]

Hi Mike,

Unfortunately you're changing fields -- it's the nature of the beast, and it would be the same for Drupal or Wordpress or other similar applications -- but if you have a bit of time to put into it, don't despair. There are lots of resources in this forum, and videos [url=http://pkp.sfu.ca/tutorials]here. If you have access to someone who has experience installing Drupal or Wordpress or equivalent, they can probably help with this too. There is also lots of help on this forum.

If you are able to make a start this way, and do find yourself overwhelmed later e.g. with upgrades or maintenance, then you can still spring for PKP hosting without losing anything; we can help transfer everything over and continue from there.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[reflections]

Thanks for the suggestion. Is there available a zipped version of the OJS software that already has the various lines marked public and has the bugs fixed? That's where I got stuck. I was thinking that perhaps I would wait until the next minor release that incorporates those bug fixes and then quickly install with that! (:}

Also, your PKP consultation services could be reimbursed for support on an hourly basis if we host it on bluehost?

Mike

[asmecher]

Hi Mike,

By "marked public" I'm guessing you mean file permissions? Unfortunately we can't do that; setups vary too much and servers typically won't preserve file permissions very well when you transfer from one machine to another or extract from an archive. This is a necessary headache.

On the other hand, don't worry overmuch about the recommended patches. There's currently nothing critical there. If you do run into any quirks later on, it's a good place to look to see whether someone has already fixed the issue, but this far along in the current 2.3.x line of releases they're pretty minor.

We try to avoid getting hands-on in other server environments if possible, but we can certainly guide you a little further in these forums.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[reflections]

Thanks much, I read your early message. We are up running. I have edited the readme file with further instructions for how to load the software and configure on the www.bluehost.com servers and will be cleaning it up and making it publicly available. So far so good! http://reflectionsnarrativesofprofessio ... eflections

[birkok]

Did anybody try Hexahost?
They are special ojs installation,
Professional OJS Services by the Hexahost:
http://hexahost.com/ojs-web-hosting/

It seems better than bluehost, because ojs installed already (via a script installer).

If anybody is able to compare, please comment as soon as possible.
Thanks

[reflections]

Thanks for the referral to Hexahost. I'm up and running but didn't do any bug fixes. I've emailed them to inquire further. We've raised some start-up funds but not enough to afford PKP hosting on an ongoing basis. - Mike

[birkok]

I moved to bluehost. It seems very reliable.
But I don't referance ixwebhosting, never ever.