PHPCow Help

Alstrasoft is crap. Somehow i didn't like it when i spent great deal of time on their demo. By Google you mean igoogle?

Google offers a 'start page' application that is similar to iGoogle. Every member of the 'community' can have their own iGoogle start-page. All have pros and cons.

Aah i guess that must be a part of Google Appliance Account (comes free).
I would never ever build a site relying on such stuff. Just a question of "Brand Building".
Yes as you said, all will have their pros and cons. Nothing is this world is perfect :-).

Your idea of going for dedicated machine with PHPCow if you buy MyWEB is well placed as that removes all Software Vs HW /Server issue and it's related/associated frustrations due to meaningless time spent on endless communications.

One advantage that PHPCow MyWEB has compared to the others is that the admin has the ability to allow only approved widgets to be available by the community members. This keeps those 'porn' widget etc. from showing up on your company's or organization's member website.

The member is the only one who can see his/her site, but a member can can share his/her login info or easily share a screen shot of their site with someone else.

These a lot to consider when you are developing a 'branded' community.

Yes keeping Porn (or any objectionable content) out is good thing/feature from site's sanctity point of view. Good luck with your efforts on helping your client out in finding the most "appropriate" mix of scripts for the site and once the site is up do not forget to share the URL if possible.

I've considered using the MyWeb, and do like it....its just too expensive, and considering our experience with PHPCOW staff, its just too much of a risk.

I have a problem with selling a product (PHPCOW or MyWeb), and then forcing hosting down a potential clients throat......and before you argue the point, look back over serval posts here and elsewhere where the hosting issue has been talked about, most specifically the issue with server optimization.....separate the products into different departments, its too late to make people use the PHPCOW hosting if they want support.

We used gossamer-threads ( http://gossamer-threads.com ) products (all being heavy duty mod_perl stuff). They often came up with same argument. If you want speed and optimize server to host gossamer scripts then they say host wit them. They can't optimize servers in other DC. Nothing wrong. It just boils down to personal choices. We never hosted with them as we could do our bit on server optimization ourselves and could run their scripts as fast as they run on their servers.

If you do a search for user anup123 you would huge threads on arguments. But at the end of the day they were pretty straight forward. They cannot guaranty anything on servers not in their control. Fair enuff.

Look at their dedicated pricing http://www.gossamer-threads.com/hosting/dedicated.html

They guaranty that a celeron with them would outdo a p4 elsewhere. So the prices look pretty steep but they are worth it if one doesn't want to break head or is incapable of handling the issues on their won.

I'm happy with my hosting, good people........we've tinkered quite a bit with our server (increasing max connections, sessions time outs, etc).

If/ when the price drops, i have a couple ideas for websites using MyWeb. I thin its a great idea, just too expensive.

You never know. Who knows when they release V3 they may increase price of CMS Script also. This is just a shot in the dark, looking at their MyWEB prices.

Capper are you sure you are running with latest patch applied? I have my doubts. There have been some huge speedups done somewhere around first qrtr this year where the CPU utilization has come down.