A few days ago, I had an interesting conversation with a very excited GoGrid user. So much so, that he was working on getting all of his production websites migrated over to GoGrid, but only after he fully installed cPanel. Using cPanel, he said, would enable him to seamlessly migrate all of his clients’ sites. He kept running into little tweaks that he needed to do here and there, but kept working on it, happy that he could so easily build up and rip down server instances with GoGrid. Eventually, he got it to work. His ultimate suggestion? Get an Operating System image with cPanel installed, or at a minimum, have a bare-bones install of CentOS so that cPanel could be installed easily.

As we continue to build out the GoGrid Operating System images (shortly to roll out some new ones), I thought that it would make sense to ask what Open Source software you might want to see in upcoming template releases.

My list of Open Source apps that I would want on Windows and/or Linux is growing and includes:

• WordPress
• Joomla!
• Bugzilla
• Trac
• Moodle
• Subversion (maybe with Trac)
• SugarCRM
• MediaWiki
• Webmin
• cPanel
• Alfresco
• Twiki
• Community Server

What about actual Operating Systems like Ubuntu or Debian?

How about combinations of the OS and Open Source app?

I realize that these are simple Open Source applications but do you really want to spend hours installing and configuring your server for these to work? The whole goal of GoGrid is “control in the cloud” and make server deployments quick and easy. With these templates, we hope to make the process even easier, turnkey and ready-to-go out of the box! Post a comment with your wish list and we will see what we can do.

With the additions of new GoGrid server templates, especially the Facebook-ready ones, we know that you will really want to understand what is contained within each image, down to the version numbers. We have made this as easy as possible to get to. When you install a Server using one of the pre-defined Operating System templates, you now have an icon that looks like an “i” next to the OS and Template selections. Clicking on that icon will launch the new GoGrid Wiki that contains useful details on GoGrid.

The GoGrid Wiki provides information around the:

• Supported Operating Systems
• Template Images
• Billing Model
• User Interface
• Network Devices

As more functionality is added to GoGrid, this information will expand.

You can drill down through each of the sections. Below is the Operating Systems expanded.

And within each Operating system, you can view details of what the current different templates are. All new templates are flagged with the icon.

Clicking on the CentOS 4.4 Facebook image, for example, provides the following information:

• Install Notes – basically an output of “uname -a;“
• Security – how the iptables is set up, for example
• Image Details – see the software packages and associated version contained within the default GoGrid template. You can see this by running the Linux command: “rpm -qa;“

We encourage you to peruse the new Wiki as many of your version question can be answered there. Also, you can get additional details on Load Balancing, the UI and Billing. If there is something that is not covered within the Wiki or this blog, drop me a note.

Our second round of new GoGrid templates have been released today, bringing some great new functionality: Ruby-on-Rails and Facebook! As mentioned previously, we are rapidly compiling and releasing new server OS templates with pre-configured useful application sets.

Today we released the following 3 new templates:

Web/Application Servers:

• CentOS 4.4 (32-bit) – Facebook-ready
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit) – Facebook-ready
• CentOS 4.5 (32-bit) with Ruby on Rails

We have some other templates queued up for release early next week:

Web/Application Servers:

• Windows 2003 Server (32-bit) – Facebook-ready
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit) with Ruby on Rails

Next week we will be explaining what exactly we mean by “Facebook-ready” and “Facebook Accelerators” but essentially, if are a Facebook developer and have an application that you want to quickly get on the Facebook network, just get a Facebook-enabled GoGrid server. These servers come pre-configured in order get your application in front of Facebook users with little configuration. While you have been suffering through the application development part, we have been taking all of the pain out of the hosting part! More later about Facebook.

We have made a few changes to the GoGrid website as well including a quick comparison between GoGrid, Dedicated Hosting and Amazon’s EC2. But don’t just take our word for it, give GoGrid a try by signing up for a Trial (Pay-as-you-go) account.

As part of our regular updates to GoGrid code and functionality, we have released several new Web/Application and Database Sever Templates to GoGrid. This is part of a two set release with the next round coming tomorrow. (More information on the second set of templates in a subsequent blog post.)

One of the great features of GoGrid is the ability to instantly create new servers based on precompiled and tested templates. Our goal is to provide a significant number of templates to match many different development needs and do so in a timely manner.

Yesterday, we released the following templates:

Web/Application Servers:

• CentOS 4.5 (32-bit) with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit) with LAMP stack
• Windows 2003 Server (32-bit) with IIS, ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express

Database Servers:

• CentOS 4.5 (32-bit) with PostgreSQL 8.2
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit) with PostgreSQL 8.2
• Windows 2003 Server (32-bit) with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express

These 6 additional server images now compliment the original list of servers:

Web/Application Servers:

• CentOS 4.4 (32-bit) with Apache 2.2 and PHP 5
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit) with Apache 2.2 and PHP 5
• Windows 2003 Server (32-bit) with IIS 6.0

Database Servers:

• CentOS 4.4 (32-bit) with MySQL 5.0
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit) with MySQL 5.0
• Windows 2003 Server (32-bit) with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Workgroup (additional charge of $99.99/month)
• Windows 2003 Server (32-bit) with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Standard (additional charge of $249.99/month)

With 13 templates and growing, GoGrid is rapidly becoming the de facto source for scalable, on-demand servers. Also, remember that we are the first to bring FREE web-based load balancing into the mix, as well as an allotment of static IPs, free inbound bandwidth and a “utility” type of pricing model (pay as you go). So what are you waiting for? Sign up for GoGrid and get your development or production environment running in minutes.