­Plone App Engine:- the convenience of google app engine but using cheap/competitive hosting options like slicehost or ec2.

$20/m is reasonable for hosting, we just need to take all the system admin out of Plone hostin­g so developers can concentrate on customizing their Plone site. This would be done by making a smarter installer that didn't just install a local development version of Plone but also setup the host for you and made it easy to upload. It's all remote controlled so if you don't want to login to your box, you never need to.

This could work in conjunction with services like PondCMS where users want more support and maintainance than an unmanaged VPS provides.

 It could work as follows:-

1. Download SDK (plone unified installer on win or mac or linux)
2. Configure site locally to liking
3. Purchase VPS or EC2
4. Run hoststrapper with host password - (automatically ssh in using fabric or similar, sets up accounts, buildout and method of code and db sync)
5. Click deploy whenever you want to upload a new version of your site

No login to linux needed. No need to create svn repos. Concentrate on plone, not sys admin.

 things it would need to handle

• supervisor for memory monitoring and restarts
• email handling
  
• back of db on code upload
• rolling back when errors encountered in buildout
• handle upgrades to plone and 3rd party products
• handle multiple sites on one instance
• squid or varnish

• variety of hosts or OS not just one or two common options
• testing server so uploaded code could be checked on live data and then rolled back if needed?
• ssl for login
• integration with source control and product release management
• make dns and rewriting as easy as can be expected
• regular backups
• integration with efforts like buildoutbuilder or easy themeing to make it easy to get a useful site quicker

Comments:

A slicker customization route would be useful, for basic customization needs like changing site title, email, logo, etc. when there are suddenly hundreds of sites to manage.

I like the name, I'm learning fabric, in short.... let's do this thing ---- David Bain