Podcast Episode 31: Hosting and Installation - Mar 7th 2014

Description

The beta is just around the corner so we decided to take on the hosting and install of Rock. Listen as the team discusses the best strategies for hosting both internally and externally.

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at Rockrms.com/partners. With the release of the beta just around the corner, and we mean just around the corner, we thought we'd take an opportunity to talk about hosting and the install process before you needed to use it. First off, David, what can you tell us about the specific requirements for running Rock? We need a Windows Server, either '2 thousand and eight or '20 '12, preferably twenty twelve. For database it's SQL Server, '2 thousand and eight or '20 '12 again. Again, we recommend twenty twelve. It needs to have IAS, which is Internet Information Server and running.net4pointfive. Where should someone host Rock? Rock needs to be available both to internal staff and your public. It needs to be running someplace that provides that access. That can either be a server that you have in house or it could be a third party hosting environment. As long as your staff can get to it and if you want to use the public side of it that the public can get to. Okay. So what does the external hosting market look for hosting applications Rockjohn? Yeah. That's a good question. I mean the external hosting market, there's there's just so much diversity out there. And I think it's important that people kinda understand the high level, , kinda what they're what they're, getting for and and what the market kinda looks . And if you go out there and you and you see all the commercials and all the ads, they're really for these web hosters that are are are just really targeting small businesses and individuals. And kinda what they're betting, and and this is what they're really doing, is they're saying, hey. Come pay me money for a site that no one's gonna visit. And that's why they can afford to sell you a site for $5 because they know they can throw you on a server with 300 other people. And pretty much no one site's going get any traffic. And there's just a lot of money to be made there. Rock is a little bit different. Rock is a very full functional, full featured app. It's a very sophisticated application. And we know that when you install Rock, you're actually going to be using it as a staff and as David said, also externally. Can it run-in those very cheap web hosting environments? Yes. We've tried that. We've made sure it will. It won't run-in every single one David said. There are certain requirements for that. It has to be a Windows web host. But there's plenty of very, very cheap, web hosting, environments for that. But I would recommend not going with the cheapest option. In our install guides, there there's three of them that we recommend. One of them is a very, very cheap one. In fact, a couple of them are very, very cheap one. One is $16 a month, full package, database, everything. Will Rock run there? Yes. We have our own account there, and we run it all the time. I just don't know if I'd recommend that, though. If you're a very, very small church, that might work. If you're someone who just wants to get started and just kick the tires with Rock, again, that would work. , you're you're not gonna be putting a ton of load on it. It'll work. It does feel very responsive, I have a feeling that when you get thousands of records in there and you have, , five to 10 staff running it and maybe a hundred or two members on it, I I , you're just gonna get what you what you pay for. So that's on the very, very cheap side. , kinda moving up the scale, there's there's business class hosting. , just kinda give you a a a frame of reference. Business class hosting, in my mind, would probably be about 30 to $50 a month. That's gonna get you on a server with fewer people. It's still a shared environment, but there's fewer people. And it's really made and architected for sites that are going to get some traffic. And they know that they can't put 300, four hundred sites on the server because these a little bit more traffic at websites. So there's going to be know, maybe five to 20, sites on that server. You also get other things , , dedicated IP addresses and SSL, which would be very important for as you start looking at contributions and giving. Moving up again, you have something called, dedicated virtual machines. So you might be sharing the server physically, but the server's carved out. You you get your own little mini server within that server. And that'd be kinda 60 to $80. And then you can go from there all the way up to, , spending, , hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I really see the advanced hosting at at the very top being, , probably a hundred dollars to $400 a month. Now, some people would be , why? , we we really can't afford too And we totally understand that. we said, it'll it'll run the cheapest web host. But don't get too cheap with this. I mean, this is if this is gonna be the, , the kind of lifeblood of your information for the church, , invest in that. , you don't. The good thing is you don't have to invest in the software and support. That's free. But don't don't necessarily cheap out too much on the external web hosting if that's the direction you go in. Or if you do, just realize what you what you're getting for. , don't sign up for the $16 a month program and expect to run , , a mega church or a mega business. You're you're you're paying for something very small. I would kind of encourage even small churches to sign up for at least a business class service. And larger churches, , maybe look at some of the the dedicated virtual machines. And, , even if you're a very large church, there's cloud hosting, which we haven't we don't really have a lot of documentation for right now, but we have a lot of experience running it on Windows, Microsoft Windows Azure. It's a very sophisticated, hosting environment, but it's very scalable, very powerful. And we do hope to provide, a whole, , guide on just running this on Azure because we think that's a really scalable platform. So another thing you really have to consider is it's really hard to move applications this in the future. , installing it is easy, but getting your data transition from one platform to another, it's definitely doable. But if you're a non technical user, that's that's probably not something you you wanna be doing a lot of. So I would pick a a web host that, , will work for you today, but will also probably work for you tomorrow in in in one to two to three years out. So if you think you're you're gonna be in a high growth situation, I would just kinda buy a little bit more than you think. So that those are just, , kind of some tips on on external web hosting. And, , I I would say if you have special unique requirements, we do have some capabilities on the on the Rock site to ask questions, on that. That's some really good information for people to decide what hosting option is a good fit for their church or business. But once they've made that decision, what about install? Is this gonna be complicated? Is it hard? Is it easy? It has been really important to us to make the install as easy as possible. Just documentation and other things, we have invested a lot of time and effort in trying to make it as simple as possible. I think the biggest there's getting the server set up and then there's installing it. Once you have the servers ready, and we've talked a little bit about that, once it's ready and you actually start the install, it's a piece of cake. We've invested a lot to just try and make so. The install will even check different things if your database is set up correctly, if you have the right run time, if your server has the right permissions. It walks you through all of that. And then we also have some documentation. So whether you decide to host it internally or externally on some of the hosting providers we've suggested, we have documentation that will step you through getting to the point where you can run the install. And then again, if the install senses anything that is not quite right, it will tell you. We haven't only been investing in Rock and getting it done. The install has taken a lot of development time and testing. I think you'll find it is one of the nicest installs of a product that you'll see. Tying onto that, just realizing the beta process, tested this install a lot. We've tested it in a lot of different environments. It's still a little bit nervous that there might be some edge cases as people start installing it that, oh, we didn't think about that, didn't catch that. So we've run it through the paces. We've run it through several web hosting companies. We run it through internal hosting. We've been using it. Actually, the installer's been around for, gosh, I don't know, maybe a year. And it's been getting a lot of attention, a lot of updates as we find these little edge cases. And oh, , this web hosting company does it this way. I can actually say we have learned a lot about, , Windows web hosting and how these companies have little tricks to to make things work. But there could be through the beta process, especially some edge cases. So if if you have trouble, , realize it's beta, but give us the details and and we'll kinda help you get through it. And, hopefully, you'll be giving us some more edge cases so that when it hits release, it'll be even more, full featured and and and, easier to use. Good. Well, as it stands now, what are the steps for install? Can you walk us through that? Yeah. So it starts with a blank server. And if you're hosting internally, we have some steps to get you from basically I just finished installing Windows Server to IAS is ready and let's go. So we'll call that the blank for internal. Blank for external would be , hey, you just paid. So you have this blank website. All you need to do really is to download from our site our install package. Our install package has one file in it. You upload that single file to your website. And then you just load that file in your browser and it takes over. So the first thing as you load that in your browser, it will come and just say, Hey, welcome. I have some screenshots we can just kind of walk through. Now when it says welcome, it actually did a few things. It's actually checking back at your server, just saying, hey, what version are you? Are you Windows? Just in case you put it on the wrong type of server. It's doing a few checks just to make sure everything looks correct. The next thing it's going to do is it's to ask you for your database information. So if you're hosting internally, you'll have that information. You set that up already in previous steps. If you're on an external web hosting, going to get that from the web host. They're going to say, Okay, here's your database information. So you just type that in. Type in the database server name, the username and password to use for the database, just the name of the database on that server. And you go to the next screen. What it does again is it goes through a bunch of the environment looking into your database, making sure that it's an empty database. We don't want to install Rock into a database that has data. That just would not be a good idea. We do a few other configuration things and we come back and tell you if the environment passed. If it didn't pass, there will be little flags that tell you what wasn't right. Instead of just telling you what's not right, it will also have a link that says let's fix it together. You click on that link if there's something wrong and you come to our site and we'll give you some tips about how to resolve that issue. Again, as through the beta process, we'll be learning more about that and we'll be able to give even better tips as we learn more as it hits the real world. So first of all, we're just going to look and make sure everything looks right to us. Then what it's going to do is to this point, you've only downloaded a single file. Right? So it's going to go out to our server and it's going to bring down Rock all for you. So it just automatically downloads it and adds it to your to your web server. That takes a little bit of time. It's really going out there. It's downloading that, , this kind of large 50 meg file and and unzips it for you all behind the scenes. So don't freak out. Sometimes I get nervous as I'm installing something , is everything okay? This thing is spinning. Is everything okay? Be calm. All good. On your web host, if you have that cheap package, it's going to take longer than if you got a bigger, badder server. The next thing it's going to do is it's going to ask you what's the username and password you want to use as the administrator for Rock. So it's going to just for security reasons, we don't want everybody to come in, and the default password is admin admin. , that would just not be secure. We want to make sure that security is very important to us, especially that, , the system will be used for for things giving and stuff. So security is very important to us. We want you to give us an username and password to use for the administrator password. Then we're going to ask you just a few questions about, , what addresses you want to use for hosting. David mentioned, there's an internal side of Rock and an external side of Rock. We just want to ask you for, , what is the address of your internal portal and your external portal? Realizing too, all this can be changed later. You change the password of the administrator later. You can change these URLs later. So don't freak out if you get to a screen , I don't know what I want tomorrow, but just go with something that will work for today. We also want you to pick your time zone. Just realizing that if you're hosting externally, the server that you're hosting on probably is not in the same time zone as you are. And we just want to make sure that everything you see is in your time zone that makes sense. Especially as we think about things check-in, , it's kind of important that the times match your local time. So it's going to ask you, this is a nice little drop down, you just pick the time zone that you're in. And then we just want some really easy information about your organization. The name of it, the default email address to use, your phone number and your website. Now this isn't leaving your system. We're just configuring your system so it has your name in it, your phone number. These types of things are needed within Rack. , as we email things out, put the reply to address in there for you. So we're just pre getting some of this information to configure it for you so you don't have to go in and type it into a different screen later. Just trying to again make that really easy for you. The next screen just asks for some basic email server information. , a big piece of Rock is communication. We need to help you communicate with your congregation. So we just need to know a little bit about the email server that you want us to use. We'll kind of come back to this probably a little bit later, but this is the one screen I'm a little bit concerned about. Not that it's hard for us. It's just we can't really help you here. We can't figure out what your email server is. We would love to do that, but, , we can't figure that out for you. You're going to kind of have to know this information. You're going have to input it. , a lot of people will just know it off their cuff and they just type it right in. But if you're more of a nontechnical user, this might be, , something you might need to ask help for. You might figure out how you're hosting your email today and use those settings. I would say that documentation has some decent discussion of these settings. I would definitely look into that. And that's it. The next screen is congratulations. And you hit that button, and you're at the login. And that login you already set up for the administrator is the login you'd use to go take your next step. So the setup is really that easy. We tried to make this super easy for nontechnical users. Our goal was there's a a blogging platform called WordPress. We want it to be as easy to install as WordPress. I think, in almost every way, we've actually made it much easier than WordPress to install. So Wow. It does sound pretty simple. So the hardest part really would be, again, the dealing with your email system integration. Is that right? Yeah. That and and DNS. So we've taken and put so much effort in into helping you do all the things that we could help you with. Whenever you do web hosting, there's these technical things that there's some things we just can't help you with. We don't have the information. There's no way for us to figure it out for you. One of those is email. Another thing about email is it's so important and it's so complex. It's it's so much more complex than people would realize that, , anybody can throw up an email server and maybe get it to work. But because of spam and and and the kind of the the huge blight that is in technology, there's all these other, , really technical things to get deliverability up. , you can send email, but does how do it doesn't go in the junk mail folder? Right. So things SPF records, domain keys, these are just really technical things that, I mean, I'm pretty familiar with it and I still hate doing it. Trying to get that kind of all figured out, , it can be difficult. In the admin guide, there's a brief discussion about email services that you basically configure, and they take care of all that for you, all that really hard stuff. We work for a really large church. We have a lot of great technical resources, but we still choose to use an email service just to make sure that our deliverability is very high. Email is so important for us. We can't have a dedicated person just figuring this stuff out. I think, , maybe the best way to say is we know enough to know that we don't know enough in that area. So we we use these email services and I would I would highly recommend looking at at those for almost any size church. Even for the very small churches, some of these email services will actually give you a certain thousand number of emails for free, , to use. So I think they're they're worth it. And, , again, you can get started. You can change all that configuration later. So if what you have today, just throw it in there and and get started. Put that nugget in the back of your head that email something that you might want to read up on later in the admin guides. And then the other one I mentioned too was DNS. And that's just really the way of, hey, I have this friendly address of demochurch.com. How does that resolve to this server over here and, , wherever it's hosted? There's a system on the Internet called DNS that that does that translation of that really friendly name that we can all remember to these this, , nasty numeric name that this the the Internet runs on. So you would have to kinda configure that record. Your web hoster is gonna give you one. It's probably not one you want to really use. It'd be , , mychurch.someweirdwebhostingname.com. Probably not what you wanna market, but, , it'll work and you can get to it and you can start using it. But getting that configured, that's not rocket science, but, , if if if you're not a technical user, can be a little tricky sometimes. So I worry about those two things because really, it's those are those are tears we we have no control over. We would love to make it easier and we'd love to to figure it out for you. But, , we we can't really do that. So let's say someone walks through all these steps and they have some problems and they're just not able to get it working on their own. What's the next step for them? Well, , the first thing is if you're feeling a little nervous going into it, just try it. , I would say read the documentation and then give it a try. ? If that doesn't work, go to the Q and A. The Q and A site is going to be great. ? We want that community to be an open community and a community that you can ask questions and not have to be afraid that is that a dumb question. , there really is no dumb question on that. We also want that to be a community where you can be feel free to answer questions. , don't be afraid that even if you get the answer wrong, that's not that's not a big deal. , we're not gonna come in and and correct you and make you feel, , inferior in any means. We're gonna try to build you up as you answer those questions. So, read the documentation. Go to the Q and A. I think the other thing that we're looking at is that there are quite a few, actually, third parties who are interested in providing assistance with Rock. Either consulting on getting it running or there's actually some people thinking about maybe even doing a full web hosted version of Rock. We can say, hey, I want a version of Rock. They'll take care of all the setup and and and the month monthly kind of keep the platform running for you. They're not gonna answer questions on how do you, , just set up check-in, but they'll get the all the hosting working for you, including the email and including DNS. So realize that that community is starting to to come. It's not here today, , because Brock's not even here yet today. But there's a lot of people talking about that. In fact, we're we're kind of getting a lot of emails of people who want to meet with us to try to be able to provide that. We have a lot of meetings in the next couple of weeks just to try to see if that's a viable option. I know there's going be a few people out there already. We're working on a way of trying to match the needs to the solution providers. I'm not quite sure how that's going to work because there's just a lot of thinking that needs to go into that because we don't want do it wrong. There's things , well, how do we know that we're recommending the right people? But yet, how we don't want it to be exclusive either. , want to be open, but yet we we wanna make sure that we're recommending people who act who actually can get the job done too. Trying to protect protect both sides. Right? ? But so we're just so still trying to figure that out. But I would just, look to the newsletter, look to social media, look to our website, look to the blog for for information on that. I'll say too, can you can post that in the q and a too. , is anybody able to help me out with this? Or I would say two things first. First, read the documentation, then try. We've invested a lot of time in making the documentation as excellent as we could. It's not dry. We tried to make it feel relevant and useful. So, , it's somewhat frustrating when people come and say, Well, I want to use a product and I have this problem. And you ask, Well, did you read the documentation? And it's , No. It's kind , Well, you got invest something into it to get something out of it. Right? So, I would say read the documentation as a starting point and try and see what you think. And the documentation is really easy to work through. I mean, are screenshots that show you what you're gonna be looking at. It's easy to read. It's in very normal language, very down to earth. We have what, four or five guides released now? Yeah, definitely. , there's there's a and there's more coming for as we as we do the release. Some of them some of the install guides, they're done, but we're just not releasing them because why read the install guide when the beta is not even quite out So I'd say read that. And then also, Rich, is that the documentation is in beta too. So if there is something that documentation doesn't make sense to you, maybe we didn't quite filter it right. So put that into either the issue tracking system or maybe put it in the Q and A. I don't understand it's part of the documentation. And we are going to be polishing that documentation all throughout the beta too. So everything in Rock is in beta, know that's the cool thing. So tell us what's confusing, tell us what doesn't work. It's all open. Great. So check back soon, very soon for the release of our, beta and in the meantime, we've got some reading to do this weekend. Yeah, there's nothing, no one should be bored this weekend, right? That's right. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? With managed hosting, churches of any size can get access to Rock's amazing technology, hassle free. With just one click, Rock's managed hosting removes the roadblocks that might stop a church from switching to Rock by making the process simple. Churches get the ease of a SaaS church management system without losing any of Rock's powerful features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? 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