Alpha Software Mobile Development Tools:   Alpha Anywhere    |   Alpha TransForm subscribe to our YouTube Channel  Follow Us on LinkedIn  Follow Us on Twitter  Follow Us on Facebook

Announcement

Collapse

The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
  • Be professional in your conduct
  • Be kind to others
  • Be constructive when giving feedback
  • Be open to new ideas and suggestions
  • Stay on topic


Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
  • Spam.
  • Vulgar language.
  • Quotes from private conversations without permission, including pricing and other sales related discussions.
  • Personal attacks, insults, or subtle put-downs.
  • Harassment, bullying, threatening, mocking, shaming, or deriding anyone.
  • Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
  • Sexually explicit or violent material, links, or language.
  • Pirated, hacked, or copyright-infringing material.
  • Encouraging of others to engage in the above behaviors.


If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
  • Remove the Post or Thread - the content is removed from the forum.
  • Place the User in Moderation - all posts and new threads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted.
  • Temporarily Ban the User - user is banned from forum for a period of time.
  • Permanently Ban the User - user is permanently banned from the forum.


Moderators may also rename posts and threads if they are too generic or do not property reflect the content.

Moderators may move threads if they have been posted in the incorrect forum.

Threads/Posts questioning specific moderator decisions or actions (such as "why was a user banned?") are not allowed and will be removed.

The owners of Alpha Software Corporation (Forum Owner) reserve the right to remove, edit, move, or close any thread for any reason; or ban any forum member without notice, reason, or explanation.

Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

When you do post
First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

A note about attachments
You may only attach one file to each message. Attachment file size is limited to 2MB. If you need to include several files, you may do so by zipping them into a single archive.

If you forgot to attach your files to your post, please do NOT create a new thread. Instead, reply to your original message and attach the file there.

When attaching screen shots, it is best to attach an image file (.BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, etc.) or a zip file of several images, as opposed to a Word document containing the screen shots. Because Word documents are prone to viruses, many message board users will not open your Word file, therefore limiting their ability to help you.

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
See more
See less

Status of Alpha Web Hosting

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Status of Alpha Web Hosting

    I have not been on this forum for sometime. I was wondering what is the status of 3rd party Web Hosting for Alpha software?

    -Jeff
    Jeff Goldstein
    Web Applications For Business
    www.wafbiz.com

    #2
    Re: Status of Alpha Web Hosting

    Its probably the same as last time you were here. See http://www.alphasoftware.com/hosting/ as there is one new hosting company listed. In addtion, many consultants provide hosting service, but normally for their own programming clients. Statistically, 2/3rds of the users host the application on their own campus.
    Steve Wood
    See my profile on IADN

    Comment


      #3
      Re: Status of Alpha Web Hosting

      I guess I can understand the 2/3 of hosting, however I assume that gives the consultant some additional liability.

      I don't understand why it is so hard to get other hosting companies to also host Alpha's excellent web solution.

      -Jeff
      Jeff Goldstein
      Web Applications For Business
      www.wafbiz.com

      Comment


        #4
        Re: Status of Alpha Web Hosting

        It's come up in discussion a lot. I don't know what they are doing about it.
        Steve Wood
        See my profile on IADN

        Comment


          #5
          Re: Status of Alpha Web Hosting

          It seems to me to be a shame.

          They have a great platform, one could almost call it a RAD tool. The Web component is to me what makes it a winner; everyone is heading in that direction and I believe the inability to host with a choice of 3rd parties can be a real problem.

          They are a smart bunch at Alpha, and I hope they resolve this issue soon.

          -Jeff
          Jeff Goldstein
          Web Applications For Business
          www.wafbiz.com

          Comment


            #6
            Re: Status of Alpha Web Hosting

            While I agree with the sentiment, I can imagine some reasons why the current situation exists. If solutions to these reasons can be identified here, maybe more companies will take the ball and run with it.

            1. Alpha hosting is a moderate-sized market (probably). Therefore, the upside potential is moderate.

            2. Hosting is a cost-driven situation. In the windows or linux hosting world, many people that want hosting want to pay less than $20/month for it. If that is true of the people in #1, then the upside potential is smaller than stated in #1.

            3. Hosting is a high maintenance proposition in human terms. People who pay for hosting think they deserve help debugging their application.

            4. Alpha may be a high resource proposition in computing terms. I can't speak to this since my knowledge of WAS performance issues is very limited.

            5. Virtual hosting - There have been plenty of discussions about virtual hosting limitations, so that is a functional limitation to solve nonetheless. Yeah, work-around with Apache. Still, it is extra work.

            6. Alpha wouldn't want to provide this capability themselves, since that would be competition with their providers.

            7. They may find it hard to sign up VARs without offering $ incentives. Would that be justified? Hard to know.

            If these issues can be worked-around, you may find that more companies appear. Until then, there is little likelihood that the situation will change.

            Just a few thoughts --
            Dave

            Comment


              #7
              Re: Status of Alpha Web Hosting

              I did my own cost/effort analysis when I considered becoming a hosting provider. I ended up only providing hosting to my own programming clients where I typically control the code. And I give it away in some circumstances.

              As it's just too much of an administrative and financial liability to host a bunch of applications developed by people I don't know. I also cannot see myself hosting some mission-critical application given that "my" servers are somewhere else, out of my control. I'd need a hundred hosting clients (at $40 each) to just start to make any money, and a hundred hosting clients would require at least five linked servers, cost $1000/month, and take up all my time with administrative and otherwise small requests. And besides, I have programming work to do... That's a fair perspective from a small business operator thinking about hosting.

              The only three ways I can see Alpha hosting more broadly available are 1) some innovation on the App Server that lets common ISP's just plug it in like they do with Perl, or 2) a whole lot of money coming from Alpha to spur adoption, 3) a proliferation of Alpha web apps/sites so that common ISP's saw a strong sales opportunity.

              Now I should say, I just came from a SaaS conference, and the sort of hosted applications those big boys are talking about start at $10,000/month. SAP in a recent article, said there entry level for hosted solutions was $45,000/year. Of course, that's not just hosting cost, it includes software subscription. But it's interesting to ponder that Alpha Five provides everything you need to build solutions that warrant the same figures.
              Steve Wood
              See my profile on IADN

              Comment


                #8
                Re: Status of Alpha Web Hosting

                Steve,
                Seeing as you've attended a SAAS seminar, do you see Alpha as a suitable platform for that? Can we provide multiple clients with their own "permanent found set" to work with? I'm not even exactly sure that's the way it's done, maybe you could shed some light?

                Thanks in advance
                Bill Belanger

                Comment


                  #9
                  Re: Status of Alpha Web Hosting

                  What is a "permanent found set"?
                  Steve Wood
                  See my profile on IADN

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Re: Status of Alpha Web Hosting

                    A subset of records in the database. I would imagine that at login the tables are filtered to only show those records that belong to that particular client. Again, I'm not sure that's how it's done. At this point, I host client's databases in Filemaker but one change requires me to make that exact change for each individual client.

                    Bill Belanger

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Re: Status of Alpha Web Hosting

                      OK, yes absolutely. That's the whole reason to use a database-driven web application. ONE database for all clients, properly filtered when they log in to see only their information and whatever resources you assign.

                      Pretend you are building a Delivery application. You might have a shipping log with: CustID, TruckID, DeliveryNotes. When Customer A logs in and reviews the shipping log, they will only see records with their CustID. As they review, modify, add or delete records, their CustID will always be known and included in the process. If they looked at the Truck Inventory, they would only see Trucks assigned to their CustID, (Et cetera). How you get their CustID in to a 'global' variable (called a session variable) takes a little more explaining, but it is one of the most common thing developers do with web applications.

                      I just built an Online Bill Payment web application with Alpha. It is "three-tier" in that the Application Owner has a hundred Customers, and each Customer has a hundred Clients. The Owner (a print and fulfillment company) is producing Invoices for the Clients of each Customer, and the Clients are paying that Customer's invoice online.

                      To explain further, each Client has to set up their Banking Information in order to pay the invoices online. Each Customer has to establish an Online Merchant Account (we use ProfitStars). The payment module sends the entire request (Invoice information + Client Banking Information + Customer Merchant Credentials) via XML to the Payment Gateway. It returns a response (success or fail) and we use that to flag the invoice Payment Pending or failed. Every day we check to see if the payment got through the bank, and if so flag the Invoice Paid or with an error if the pmt failed.

                      Anyway, that is an SAAS application as far as I know.
                      Steve Wood
                      See my profile on IADN

                      Comment

                      Working...
                      X