Web Hosting Prices

We can provide Plone-based website hosting on our US and European server clusters: it is mostly intended for hosting the websites of our clients (see our hourly rates for Plone website work below), but you can simply rent your own site and do all your own work. Plone is the leading open source enterprise-level content and knowledge management system (CMS) and is commonly used by large institutions such as universities, governments and corporations. Plone is very considerably more secure and reliable than LAMP-based CMSs such as Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal - if your business has ever experienced its website being defaced or hacked, it is quite likely it was due to using a PHP-based CMS which tend to be inherently insecure and fragile. Unfortunately most cheap website hosting is LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and unless you are very vigilent in applying security patches, your site is likely not long for this world.

We simply avoid the problem by trying to avoid using anything based on PHP, even though we can work in PHP without issue if you wish. Hence because we provide a fully managed Plone web platform - which geotargets to ensure sub-200ms access times for almost everyone on the planet - our costs and therefore prices are considerably higher than LAMP products. That said, we are competitive with other Plone web hosting - and we supply a short list of links to alternative providers below.

Let us be very clear: you do not receive like-for-like when comparing Plone-based web hosting and LAMP-based web hosting. The former is of much higher quality and requires MUCH less maintenance from you - therefore, the Total Cost of Ownership will be similar or lower when choosing Plone-based web hosting, thus saving you money.

Our Current Server Locations:

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Via our geo-targeting DNS, the nearest server is chosen based on the location of the website user. This ensures that your website loads quickly no matter where they may be located. See for yourself our sub-200ms international ping times for anywhere in the Western world even as far away as China, or see for yourself how our website loads in just 1.3 seconds!

Hosting Packages:

If you don't wish to use a geo-targeting DNS service we would strongly recommend a quality anycast DNS provider such as http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/ who will give your site visitors much improved first time site load times.

Note that we reserve the right to split your storage into separate containers once it exceeds 3Gb - this can cause your storage requirements to become much higher than when using a single container. If your site grows significantly beyond our Large Usage bundle then we would strongly advise you to deploy your own server cluster - we can arrange this for you if needed.

Currently available Plone Packages:

We can install the most commonly used Plone packages on request. We are currently running Plone v3.3.

Plone/Zope Work Rates

Do you wish to rent a quality Plone-based website but don't wish to do your own work in entering content and theming the site? We can design and customise the site for you - see a portfolio of our website customisations here!

We offer special rates for work on Plone/Zope sites as follows:

Tier 1: Data and Content Entry: €60/hour (ex VAT)

This is simple structured data and content entry with hyperlinking when necessary and use of user-supplied images.

Tier 2: Basic Customisation: €85/hour (ex VAT)

This includes changes to the site theme, templates and CSS styling as well as the manipulation of images (e.g. use of Photoshop). Does not include Javascript or Python programming.

Tier 3: Complex Customisation: €115/hour (ex VAT)

This is work which involves Python or Javascript or TALES programming or custom modification of the Plone installation or any of the underlying server infrastructure.

Tier 4: Plone/Zope Development: €155/hour (ex VAT)

This is work involving the design and implementation of custom Plone/Zope datatypes and Packages and/or extensive use of the Python language. We are able to provide a discounted daily rate for substantial projects requiring more than a few days of work - enquire if interested.

We don't mind if we work on a Plone installation not hosted by us so long as it mostly follows the standard buildout and ZEO cluster structure - if it significantly differs then we may have to charge extra. We also apply the general tier discounts for charitable and open-source work as listed in the General Rates.

Furthermore you can hire anyone you like to work on a Plone installation hosted by us - we don't mind who you use so long as they are reputable (i.e. known to the Plone community). You should note however that we only give out SSH access in very particular cases: you may need to hire us for the parts of a project requiring shell work. This is because our servers have a fairly unusual configuration and we won't risk disruption to other users caused by someone unfamiliar with our setup.

Alternative Plone web hosting providers:

There are many providers offering Plone web hosting: some are cheaper than us, others more expensive.  Most offer a wider variety of Plone solutions than what we have above, and the price ranges shown below reflect totally different product offerings most of which are not easily comparable. We pulled the following straight off the top Google results, so we not recommending any of these more than anyone else:

• Amaze Solutions cost between €420-€960 a year. They are based in Holland and they host the plone.org website itself.
• Nidelven IT cost between €80-€265 a year which is one of the cheapest in Europe to our knowledge.  They are based in Norway.
• Redomino cost between €150-€450 a year. They are based in Italy.
• Quintagroup cost between US$150-$450 a year. They are based in the US and are one of the biggest providers of Plone hosting in the world. They are big contributors to the Plone software itself.