Help with C.E. hosting solutions

[burg]

Hi everyone, I'm completely new to CRM software and not a techy, so I'm confused about my options for using the community edition. We are a small business, so a budget option like the C.E. is great. How do we find appropriate hosting? Do we go with the host of our website (and add space)? Do we go with a separate 3rd party hosting site?

My original plan was to find someone who can install, setup and tweak the Community Edition for us. Then we would find 3rd party hosting. But, I see in this forum that there are companies that provide the C.E. along with hosting. Does this mean that you sign up with them like you would sign up for the PRO edition on the Sugar website?

Forgive my obvious lack of understanding. I'm trying though and would appreciate some guidance

[pbel]

Hi Burg. We are using CE version too. What you should get is a hosting service that support PHP and MySQL. Additionally (but I guess that's normal) you should get a ftp access to this server space.

What helps is if you get SFTP access too. This way you can use tools like Cyberduck (Mac FTP client - but there are PC tools also that are able to do that) to upload a zip archive and to unpack it on the server (is much faster than uploading 1000 small files). But that is just a nice to have.

For the DB you should have some management tool like PHPMyAdmin installed by the provider so you can do backups and in ther worst case corrections.

Maybe somebody else could comment on using HTTPS. I guess if you have sensitive data this would be a good way to go for.

For development I'm using currently a Mac computer with "Web Sharing" (which is in fact a Apache server). Just added in apache.conf the PHP module loader. Installed a MySQL Database and there you go (or you start with one of the installers that install everything for you.

I hope this helps. If you have more specific questions just aks. Cheers Petr

[sts]

On the SugarCRM homepage you can find contact information of SugarCRM partner companies. Some of them offer hosting for different editions of Sugar including CE. This hosting is not for free off course so you'll have to sign a contract for hosting and other services (for installation, customization, backups, updates, etc.).

Another option is to install SugarCRM CE local on your own server ... For this you don't have to pay anything, just download the package and start ... In this case you'll need some interest in the technical stuff and _time_. For your local installation SugarCRM partners are also giving - payed - help if needed.

[rafael.q.g@hotmail.com]

Just complementing yoiu can setup sugar CE in any computer with has an "apache/php" server installed and also a mysql server. These two services is not heavy and nowadays any computer can support that.

So just enforcing to hyave sugar working you have two options:
- setup it in your own computer (own company computer) and make it your server.
- make a contract with externals for rent a space in a computer with these prerequirements.

[Angel]

Hi everyone, I'm completely new to CRM software and not a techy, so I'm confused about my options for using the community edition. We are a small business, so a budget option like the C.E. is great. How do we find appropriate hosting? Do we go with the host of our website (and add space)? Do we go with a separate 3rd party hosting site?

My original plan was to find someone who can install, setup and tweak the Community Edition for us. Then we would find 3rd party hosting. But, I see in this forum that there are companies that provide the C.E. along with hosting. Does this mean that you sign up with them like you would sign up for the PRO edition on the Sugar website?

Forgive my obvious lack of understanding. I'm trying though and would appreciate some guidance

You might find these articles of help, they discuss both the topic of hosting in general and also some guidelines to look for in providers:

Angel's Blog: SugarCRM 101: Non-Commercial vs. Commercial Hosting

Angel's Blog: SugarCRM 101: 10 Questions for Hosting Providers

[sts]

What helps is if you get SFTP access too. This way you can use tools like Cyberduck (Mac FTP client - but there are PC tools also that are able to do that) to upload a zip archive and to unpack it on the server (is much faster than uploading 1000 small files). But that is just a nice to have.

Uploading files is possible with ModuleLoader (in admin section) too. Just create a zip file including the files to upload and a manifest file (manifest.php) defining where to put those files. This needs a bit time to create the manifest file but the benefit of this approach is that it is possible to uninstall the changes if needed.
Here is a nice example for this uploading mechanism: http://cheleguanaco.blogspot.com/201...el%27s+Blog%29