A commercial host site for Seaside (Smalltalk) web apps.

I was hoping something like this would come along. I saw a response from Victor to my blog post “Exploring Squeak and Seaside” saying there is a commercial host site for Smalltalk/Seaside available in Toronto, Canada. I got in contact with Chris Cunnington, the man setting this up. He didn’t have it all set up then, but he just put it online recently. It’s called Seaside Parasol. Forgive me if I sound like I’m putting in a plug for this service. I am interested in seeing services like this succeed, but mainly what I’m trying to do here is inform you about it.

How do you sign up for this service? Click the “host” link on the homepage, and then click on the PayPal link. Chris has said in the past that customers can pay for as many months as they’d like. The rate he has set currently is $29.99 CAD/mo.–Canadian dollars per month, roughly $26.28 US dollars/mo., as of this writing. Once you have paid,  send him an e-mail (he provides the e-mail address), and he’ll set you up and send you back instructions for getting access to your account. Pretty basic, kind of like the way services probably operated pre-internet-boom. It’s a start.

A note about international money transfers for the uninitiated in the U.S. Currency values fluctuate relative to others daily. So while $29.99 Canadian may be $26.28 U.S. dollars now, it may be a different amount in U.S. dollars in the future, up or down. Day to day changes are not much, on the order of a few cents at most. A year from now it may be $24 U.S. dollars, or $27 (just speculating). Since this could be a long-term commitment for you, it would be wise to take a look at what the highs and lows of the U.S. dollar-to-Canadian rate has been over the past few years. If the conversion rate is high now, you’ll probably want to just make a month-to-month commitment, and then sign up for several months or a year once the U.S. dollar rate is lower, so you can lock in the lower rate. When you pay through PayPal, you’ll probably enter your payment amount in Canadian dollars. It will show up converted into U.S. dollars on your credit card, using whatever is the current conversion rate.

If you’re not into Seaside/Smalltalk, you don’t have to be. He’ll host your site even if you use PHP or Perl. , but he provides plenty of documentation on Seaside through his blog, at Seaside Parasol.

This is quite a unique feature–instructional material on learning this Smalltalk-based web framework alongside the internet service. The blog is available for free. You don’t have to sign up to access it. It’s not a straightforward tutorial, but rather it documents Chris’s experience of learning Squeak and Seaside. His blog is written in a rambling, narrative style. It has sample code, and screenshots. If you’re looking for a “quick start” tutorial, this isn’t it, but if you have the time it might be a good read. I haven’t gotten though it myself, so I can’t judge. [Update 6/9/07 - Unfortunately, as best I can tell, Chris's blog, which was called "Object Lessons", is gone.]

Some limitations on the service at this time are it does not support e-mail (e-mailing from your web app.), and hosting a database (like MySQL, or PostgreSQL). It does support quite a bit of RAM, however. It may support an integrated Squeak object database. There are a few of those available, as I’ve mentioned earlier. If you’re curious about this, e-mail Chris. He’s friendly and responsive. From the way he’s presenting the features, it sounds like e-mail and database support will be coming eventually, perhaps without an increase in the rate. I can’t speak for Chris.

The main advantage you get at this point is you can create a site in Seaside, and you can put your own domain name on it, in contrast to the service in Switzerland, called SeasideHosting, which is free, but your site has to exist in a subfolder of their seasidehosting.st domain.

On the down side it’s pricey right now, at least by U.S. standards with the features it offers. Maybe this is the typical rate for hosting in Canada. Doing a quick search on the internet I can find web hosters that will do ASP.Net, PHP, and Perl hosting, plus e-mail, and sometimes database access for anywhere from $10-$12 U.S. dollars per month, sometimes less than that if you manage to get a special deal. I’ve seen Ruby on Rails hosting, with all of these features, for $7 per month. These are likely shared hosting arrangements, however. I’m not sure if Seaside Parasol offers shared or dedicated servers. With any service dedicated servers are quite a bit more expensive.

I hope more commercial Seaside hosters come on the scene in the Western Hemisphere. I’d like to see at least one open in the U.S.! I can hear the response now, “Sheah! And monkeys may come flying out of my butt!” I can dream, can’t I?