[Mapserver-users] Inexpensive web hosting option using postgresql, postgis, mapserver, and perl/php mapscript

[Jonathan W. Lowe]

List,

Periodically, emails appear on this list asking about mapserver-friendly web 
hosting options.  I've discovered one and have been successfully using it for 
several months now and thought others might benefit from knowing about it.  So 
here's a testimonial:

The company is www.pghoster.com.  For $10 per month, pgHoster offers domain 
hosting with 300 Mb of space and 8 GB of data transfer.  This alone is quite 
competitive, but of interest to the mapserver audience is that pgHoster pre-
installs postgresql, postgis, mapserver, and php or perl mapscript.  The one-
time charge to establish the account and preinstall these packages was about 
$45 last I knew.

When you sign up for an account that includes these open-source components, 
part of the installation package is a working template with a small sample 
dataset to get you started with both the plain vanilla mapserver site and a 
perl mapscript sample site.  To preview these templates, see 
http://www.pghoster.com/gis/

A little more background is also available in the media.  I publish a monthly 
column in Geospatial Solutions magazine on emerging spatial technologies and 
got the mapserver religion when researching the software for a previous column 
called "Spatial on a Shoestring" that featured open-source spatial software.  
Since so many of the challenges with online mapping seem to involve the initial 
setup and, for some, the high pricetag of commercial web-mapping software, 
pgHoster's offering seems to answer the needs of potentially a lot of users, so 
I've covered them in this month's column under the title "Bottom Line Pricing 
in the Land of Oz -- Spatial Web Site Architecture".  An html version is 
available at the following URLs:

Page covering pghoster:  http://www.giswebsite.com/pubs/200305/nr200305_p4.html

Beginning of column:  http://www.giswebsite.com/pubs/200305/nr200305_p1.html

According to their representatives, pgHoster already has close to 1000 
customers (thanks in large part to PostgreSQL's listing of their hosting 
service at the top of a recommended vendors list).  I hope the offering is 
helpful to anyone on this emailing list interested in inexpensive spatial 
database & interactive web page hosting.

Best of luck!

Jonathan

-- 
Jonathan W. Lowe
email - jlowe at giswebsite.com
website - http://www.giswebsite.com