AmbitiousLemon closed to new hosting requests a couple days ago while our committee reviews the pending requests. As of today we have completed the initial screening and are going to seriously consider the 22 (out of an original ~80). It will take about a week for all committee members to carefully review and comment on all the requests. If you completed a hosting request and have not heard back from us (and assuming spam filters haven’t prevented you from receiving our response) then we will be seriously considering your request.

Last night we updated Passenger to version 2.2 from 2.1 and discovered some time afterwards that this update broke the implementation of rails hosting used by most of our rails users. This is apparently a deliberate change made by the Passenger developers to better accommodate Capistrano-style deployment setups. While we evaluate how to best handle this change we are attempting to roll back the update to again server rails apps using Passenger 2.1. This is not a long term solution, so we may need to find a way to allow rails users to easily and safely set their document root without using symlinks. This likely will mean that when we do update to Passenger 2.2 again, our rails users will need to take some action in order to transition their sites to the new system (this is vague because we don’t yet know how we will handle this transition). So we ask our Rails users to be extra watchful of announcements from us in the future.

Here at AmbitiousLemon we support an unusual variety of web frameworks, and we are always adding more. Combinations of some of these frameworks and some of our other features like Trac, subversion, postgresql, etc are difficult to find in a web host (free or otherwise). We offer these features because we actually use these servers for our own websites and because we are just generally excited by web technologies. So we understand why so many people requesting hosting accounts would be similarly excited about getting an account and just sort of playing around with this unusual mix of technologies. One of our core constituencies named in our mission is the education community so we are further excited by how many people want to further their education by learning how to use these technologies.

Despite all of this we do not grant hosting requests to people just wanting to do some unstructured learning. The primary reason for this is the kind of web hosting we offer is called “shared hosting.” What this means is there are many other websites being hosted on the server. Simply put, your playing around can adversely effect other members. The best way to learn these new technologies is to install them on your local machine (your PC). This way every time you need to restart the server, tweak the apache configuration, or write a bad script that causes apache to crash you won’t disrupt anyone else’s website.

We don’t want to discourage people who are excited by our service from applying for membership, but what we ask of you is that:

1. You understand that development should be performed on your local machine, not on our production server. Tools such as Trac, Subversion, Capistrano, etc can aid you in keeping the community informed of your progress and rolling out updates to your web app after its initial launch.
2. You submit a request that involves a specific project proposal. Tell us what you want to create and how you plan to use our server to accomplish your goal.
3. If your project involves doing something that has already been done (like a blog, social networking site, micro-blogging, etc) that you explain why this project needs to be hosted. Writing these sorts of apps can be helpful in learning a language, but what does the final result of this intellectual exercise offer that will be of interest and use to people other than yourself and your mom. What is novel about your project?

If you come to us with a specific project that will be useful to others and educational for you and that we can practically serve we won’t be able to turn down your request.

We have completed reviewing the past round of requests and are again open for new requests. This last round was a bit overwhelming and took us considerably longer to review. We admitted 25 new members out of roughly 100 requests submitted. As a result we will be keeping future openings shorter so that the resulting set of requests can be more quickly reviewed by our committee.

The current hosting request submission window is from today until 27 June.

Before submitting a request it would be a good idea to browse this blog to get a feel for what we are looking for since I often comment on requests.

There are a few categories of requests we get quite frequently:

1. Social Networking site for a specific University – we get a handful of these every time. Those that we accept do a good job explaining why their school isn’t providing hosting and what their site will provide that the myriad of other social networking sites lack. They also must demonstrate that they have the skills to complete the site.
2. Websites for scouting groups – We also tend to get a handful of these requests in every opening. While the Girl Scouts and other scouting groups are welcome, we no longer accept any hosting requests from The Boy Scouts of America. We have been made aware that the Boy Scouts of America have been sued on numerous occasions for discrimination and continue their discriminatory practices today. This unfortunately means the group is in violation of our rules. We also want to encourage all scouting groups to let their organizations know that website hosting is something important to you and might be something the organization should consider providing on its own. Until they do, we will help out when we can.
3. Websites for artists – We host many artists, and encourage more to apply for hosting. While many of our artists are graphic artists we also host musicians, dancers, and other performing arts.
4. Sites for school projects – We get many requests for hosting for student projects. We do grant hosting to some of these requests but you need to explain why your school isn’t hosting it, or in some cases why creating your own web server (in the case of large university level projects) isn’t part of the project.
5. Non-profit Organizations – Like artists, NPOs are another group named specifically in our mission. We do occasionally deny requests from NPOs when they do not do an adequate job filling out responses to the questions section of our request form. Please make sure you respond to all our questions.

The number one reason requests are denied to that not enough information is provided in the questions section. If you want your request accepted please be thorough when answering our questions.

We have completed reviewing the requests from the last round of new member requests, and have admitted about 10 new members.

With the new members settled in, we are ready to begin another round of hosting requests. From now until 22 May we will be accepting hosting requests again. Beginning 23 May we will begin reviewing the requests and granting membership to those who make the cut.

A few notes that will help guide you as you consider submitting a request:
1) We are a production server, not a development server. So if you just want to play around its best to do that on your PC. If you are seriously developing a product though we offer support for developer tools such as Trac, Subversion, and many web frameworks.

2) Charities and other Non-profit organizations have priority for membership, but still need to do a good job explaining to us what they do. If you are a registered non-profit organization please provide evidence of your registration.

3) Artists of all sorts were one of the first communities we served and are looked upon favorably for new accounts.

4) The more information you provide to us in your hosting request, the more likely your chances of being approved. You will be asked a variety of questions when you apply for membership, use this opportunity to really try to sell us on your idea. If you seem excited about your idea there is a good chance we will be excited as well.

5) If you are a student please let us know why your school’s hosting options do not work for you.

We experienced a couple 2-3 minute periods of downtime this afternoon around 4PM EST.

It was caused by a script that runs after creating accounts for new members. We’ve corrected the problem, so it shouldn’t cause any issues in the future.

We are currently reviewing the hosting requests from the last round of submissions. If you submitted a completed request and have not received a response from us yet, then your request made the initial cut and will be reviewed by the committee.

We have a soft goal of making a decision on all requests by Monday 16 April.

We have reopened membership. This request period will end on 14 April 2009. It will take us approximately a week after that to review the requests and begin sending out approval notices.

We found this shorter 2 week application period made reviewing requests much more manageable for our review board. During our last membership opening we admitted 9 of 64 applicants. As you apply (or reapply) please take your time to submit quality responses to all the questions asked and remain mindful that should you be approved you will be sharing space on the server with charitable groups.

Since this service is free members rarely notify us when they stop using their hosting account. Because of this we periodically do an audit of sites to clear out the idle accounts. Sites that are obviously inactive are disabled without notice. Sites that we suspect are idle will receive an email from one of us asking the member to respond in order to keep the site active.

If your site is no longer accessible please contact us, we may have erroneously disabled your account and can quickly and easily reactivate your account. If you are no longer using your AmbitiousLemon account please let us know so we can disable your account and thus make room for new members. If you received an email from us regarding the status of your account please respond so we know whether you are still active or not.

Last night’s downtime didn’t go entirely as expected. As expected things were up and down a bit from 2am to 2:22am. The unexpected bit came at 4:30am when we went down and didn’t come back up. Around 11am things came back online. This downtime was due to some changes at the carrier hotel rather than anything we were doing ourselves. No word from the carrier hotel what was going on. My best guess is that some of the new hardware that was being swapped in had some unexpected problem.