Getting started with Ode means confronting the challenge of picking a hosting provider.

Why am I recommending a provider? I want to put together a set of step by step installation instructions for anyone who is starting at the very beginning and wanting to get Ode up and running as quickly as possible.

Starting at the beginning presents the challenge of picking a hosting provider. This can be one of the more intimidating aspects of getting started. It means venturing beyond the relative safety of your local system/your private network at home onto the open internet. It's a big step.

(Note: There is no need to be intimidated. The internet is ready for you, as is your chosen provider. You don't need to be worried about breaking something or making an irrevocable mistake. The most you'll do is waste a little bit of your own time and maybe get a little frustrated.)

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Isn't it true that you have to pay for an account with a hosting provider?

Yes, with rare exception you do. However, there are many providers that offer fee free trials and money-back guarantees (beyond the trial period). The provider I am going to recommend offers both. So, trying out Ode doesn't need to cost you a thing.

There are many (many, many) hosting providers in business. You may be surprised just how different they are from each other, and how much variation there is in pricingm, and services offered. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to assume that similar services offered by different providers are equal. There are many factors to consider that impact price and performance, including among many others: infrastructure and connectivity (how well connected is the provider), support, hardware (allowances related to processor utilization, memory usage, allocated disk space, etc), restrictions (network bandwidth, network throughput, etc.), and software (does the provider offer the software necessary to run an Ode site for example). Coming to terms with all of this can be confusing.

You're free to choose whatever hosting provider you prefer, assuming they satisfy Ode's minimal requirements of course (which boils down to support for running Perl CGI scripts). However, I realize that if you don't already have a preferred hosting provider, telling that you can use whichever provider you like probably sounds more like a challenge than an invitation. What's more, if I'm going to provide step by step instructions I need to be able to refer to some specific environment. For both of these reasons I am going to recommend a provider.

I want to be clear that you are absolutely free to ignore my suggestion, OK? Good, I'm glad you understand that point.

The hosting provider I'm recommending is DreamHost. I realize this may not be everyone's preferred provider. Furthermore, I understand that it may not be the best possible provider based on one or another technical consideration. These are not the reasons that I've picked DreamHost. However, this is not an arbitrary choice either. I'm recommending DreamHost for what I believe to be quite a few legitimately good (for you) reasons.

Without getting into a debate about the comparative advantages/disadvantages of all of the hosting providers out there here are several of the reasons I'm recommending dreamHost:

1 - Their approach

Consider this from their 'about us' page :

We're Special.

DreamHost is owned by its employees. We're a tight-knit family and we're not looking to sell out to investors or media conglomerates or other gigantic companies who care more about the bottom line than providing solid web hosting.

Believe us, there's plenty of those in the hosting industry already and you probably don't want to get mixed up with them.

The guys who work at those companies are crazy. They earn sales commissions. They dress in 'business casual' attire. Some of them might even wear suits! They'll toss around fancy words like 'monetizing' and 'ROI'. They attend hosting 'conferences'.

They wear cologne.

Wearing cologne in the DreamHost office is grounds for a firing. Or at least a solid 8 hours of harassment.

The Bottom Line

We love it here and we're all focused on hosting. It's what we do. It's what we're good at.

That comes as close to capturing the Ode ethos as I've found. This attitude is spread across the site. You'll continually come across this unpretentious, relaxed, welcoming, and apparently genuine attitude in your interactions with DreamHost (and in dealing with your account at dreamhost.com). If it's a lie, it's a pretty lie, and it makes the experience of managing a hosted site more enjoyable than it would be otherwise.

2 - Simple hosting package(s).

While other providers present a complicated matrix of product offerings, there is essentially a single DreamHost web hosting package (http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html). As you may already know, Ode is predicated on the idea that simple is good.

3 - 2 week free trial

Their hosting package includes a free 2 week trial. You will not be billed until after your 2 week trial expires. Unfortunately they do collect billing info from you when you sign up for an account. I don't know of any other provider with a free trial that is different in this regard. If you are going into this thinking that you will most likely keep your Ode site, then this probably isn't a concern. In fact it's kind of nice to get the payment part of the process out of the way. If you're assuming that you will probably not want to keep your ode site, then this is somewhat of a pain. The only consolation I can provide is that they make it easy to cancel your account at any time.

You do not need to call, chat, or otherwise interact with anyone to cancel your account.

4 - 97 day money-back guarantee

If you cancel your account at any time during the first 97 days they will automatically refund all of your money (with the exception of domain registration fees, which like all registrations are valid for a period of at least a year and cannot be unregistered. Note: It is not a requirement that you register a domain with DreamHost to take advantage of their hosting service).

If you cancel your account at any point after the initial 97 days they will refund a prorated portion of whatever you have paid them for the unused time remaining on the account.

5 - Simple account cancellation

I don't believe in locking users into any one way of doing things. It's true that in some cases it may be almost unavoidable, but I always want to see a provider at least make a good faith effort to provide a reasonable way out for customers buying into a service.

This is an increasingly important issue as more and more software is finding it's way to the web. So for example, when I consider a service like Flickr that invites users to spend potentially hundreds of hours uploading, annotating, and organizing photos, the first question I have is if it's possible for users to take all of that investment with them should they decide to stop using the service.

With Ode, this issue is almost irrelevant. Posts are discrete plain text files. There is no more universal format. 'Exporting' all of your content is as simple creating a copy as you would any other files, using the mechanisms provided by your operating system, file transfer app, or other applications. If you spend anytime designing your own themes, these too are nothing more than text. Themes should consist of standards compliant markup and the like (HTML, CSS, and whatever other markup or code you choose to include).

Considering just how important this is, I'm very happy to see that DreamHost does nothing to lock customers into their accounts. As I've already mentioned you can cancel your account at any point and receive a refund for the unused prepaid time.

It takes just a couple of clicks to start the process of canceling your account (and then another 2 or 3 to confirm the cancellation). Once you've completed the process, which takes only a minute or two, the cancellation is effective immediately.

This is especially generous considering that they offer discounts for committing to a plan covering a longer period of time (1, 2, ..., 10 years). So, you have the option of saving money by opting for longer commitment, which also means locking in today's rate (it is reasonable to think that the rate will increase at some point in the next 10 years), while at the same time having the option of canceling your account and getting your money back.

The only downside of course is that paying in advance for a very lengthy plan means spending a lot of money upfront.

6 - Affordable plans

Is hosting free? No it's not. Are the plans affordable? Yes, I'd say they're downright inexpensive.

You have the option of paying per month (pay as you go) or purchasing a year or longer in advance.

Current pricing is as follows:

• Pay as you go: $10.95 per month + a one time $50.00 set up fee
• 1 year: $9.85 per month w/o the set up fee ($119.40)
• 2 years: $8.95 per month w/o the set up fee ($214.80)

I recommend you avoid the pay as you go plan. The $50 set up fee will pay for 5 months of service at the $9.85 you pay per month on the 1 year plan. (Remember that you can cancel at any time and get a refund on the unused portion of your up front payment.) That's assumes you're paying the list price.

Here's a trick. Use the promo code ODE10000 and save $97 on the cost of a plan.

$119.40 - $97 = $22.40

$22.40 for an entire year is $1.87 per month. I hate subscription fees as much as the next person, but $1.87 is a pretty great deal. (I'll tell you what you get for that 1.87 per month in a moment.) Heck $8.95 isn't half bad.

7 - Alternative payment methods

I understand that some of you might prefer to not to pay with a credit card. DreamHost offers several alternative payment methods including:

• PayPal
• Debit card
• Personal check

Be aware that the money-back guarantees are available only if pay with a credit card. For that reason it's probably best to use a credit card if you can (but there are other options if necessary).

8 - Value

Value isn't just a matter of price. It's what you get for the money you spend. DreamHost gives you a lot.

I won't bother with a complete list of everything included with DreamHost's standard hosting package. You can find the full details at http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html. I encourage you to go take a look.

Instead, I'll focus on the key features:

• Unlimited storage space
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited number of domains hosted under a single account
• Full shell, SSH, SFTP access with support for an unlimited number of user accounts
• Free registration for one domain (of course you can purchase additional domains for only $9.95 a piece - by comparison, other registrars charge as much as $29.95 or more for popular gTLDs, e.g. com, net, org)
• Free domain WHOIS privacy (DreamHost is the only registrar I've seen that provides this service for free).
• Perl and CGI support (of course)
• WebDAV - A nice complement to Ode which allows you to interact with your site (content, themes, etc.) directly on the server. (Most mainstream operating systems, including Windows 7 and Mac OS X, allow you to interact with a webDAV share just as you would a attached hard drive.)

So DreamHost provides unmetered hosting with all of the features you're likely to need for as little as $1.87 a month. That's value.

What's the catch?

This is shared hosting which means that your site runs on the same hardware as possibly many other sites, and so shares hardware resources with those sites (including the CPU and memory). This means that the performance and stability of your site can be impacted activity related to another account.

Is this something you should be considered about? No, in all likelihood this is not going to be a problem.

In my experience, performance with DreamHost has always been more than satisfactory. (I do realize that 'in my experience' does not amount to a scientific assessment). If it makes you feel any better, they do offer a 100% uptime guarantee.

Shared hosting is not probably not an option if you happen to have one of the more popular sites on the web, but it's just fine for the rest of us. (I should say that Ode is also probably not a great option if you are running one of the web's most popular sites.)

You can easily upgrade your site to a virtual private server (with dedicated hardware resources), dedicated hosting (your own physical server at a data center affiliated with DreamHost), or colocation (you provide your own server and they provide the connectivity and other services in their secure facility) should that prove to be necessary.

9 - Ease of use

A toolbox on the left presents the following options:

• Manage Account
• Manage Domains
• Manage Email
• Manage Users
• MySQL Databases
• One-Click Installs

To make things even easier, anyone using their DreamHost account strictly for Ode only need only be concerned the first two of those selections.

Manage Account takes you to a page with all of the info you're likely to want to know about your account with DreamHost, including complete billing information in big bold type (billing period, rebill date, payment method on file, current balance).

You'll also find info about your hosting plan which can be directly edited (or cancelled) from this page.

That's it about DreamHost. Again, you are free to use any hosting provider you like. But, if you don't have a preference, DreamHost is a pretty safe bet with a company that doesn't try to lock you into a lengthy commitment.