[web-devel] haskell web development with a restricted shell account

[news at n-mayr.de]

Hello Markus, hello list!

Am 2010-07-01 um 17:17 schrieb Markus Läll:

> maybe I could compile my programs and copy those executables to the
> cgi folder?

I was thinking about that too lately. I don't know exactly how the situation is around the world but in germany providers don't want you to run your own programs via cgi, because they have not much control over them. Also CGI wastes their CPU time. Instead they could offer FastCGI. But then they had even less control. So what they usually offer here are virtual servers and root servers at high prices where you have to care about everything yourself. And for the rest of the clients they provide damn cheap accounts with mysql, php, and perl preinstalled in a variety of versions, and some open source wiki/blog/forum packages but lack of everything that is non mainstream.

So your chances would be kinda low, if you had an average german provider. I don't know if you are willing to change providers. What I did find though were at least one provider which did offer to care about the whole linux system stuff/updates and let you install any kind of binaries in your home folder and communicate cia cgi/fastcgi/apache-modules. (There is no up to date haskell module, as far as i know.) I forgot the name of the provider, but I found it by downloading the archives of this mailing list and did a "grep webserver" or "grep provider" or similar - is there a search online? maybe you should google that first or someone here has a link at hand.

What I finally did was find a good friend who let me play on his root server and registered with an external dns provider. I think it would be great if there was a provider - maybe someone of us - who does offer ssh accounts on a server with a preinstalled linux/unix/mac, which has ghc installed, fastcgi running and maybe happstack/happs/snap/other packages installed. I would pay around 5 EUR/month for such an account and if we got 10 people (or even less) together we could easily pay the rent for a root/virtual server.

Nikolas