Koumbit – non-profit cooperative (non-profit incorporation works better for this in Quebec), they handle not just projects but webhosting, monitoring, etc.
Aegir – Meant to simplify management, updating multiple sites, has a web GUI, so clients can clone etc. sites themselves, do testing, and merge back into their main site.
Also good for mass hosting/turnkey solutions – lots of folks just want a very basic Civi install, and Aegir lets you provide that.
Also deploy it for clients that only have one client per server – makes it easy to test upgrades.
Also configures DNS, SSL, Apache etc. via modules – through the web GUI.
The advantage over custom scripts is the community writing modules etc.
Aegir is still in development, but is stabilizing now – 0.4RC1 is out now, and 0.4 should be considered a “1.0” release. It requires a “dedicated” server, it needs root access to, etc., set Apache vhosts. Best on a vanilla Debian host, “takes about 15 minutes”. You need root to install the Aegir system account, which in turn uses sudo quite a bit, but doesn't need root user post-installation.
Works best on Debian, folks have great success with Ubuntu. People are working on CentOS, Solaris, MacOS.
Will configure DNS and SSL for you – just doesn't cover SSH/SFTP automation.
Installation is neither hard nor trivial.
Relies heavily on drush, “not reinventing the wheel”
“Verify” in Aegir regenerates settings.php, fixes file permissions, etc. - several times they've fixed client problems by pressing “Verify”.
Platforms are created with drush makefiles
You can include patches to modules in the makefile – very cool!
New aegir tasks are queued and run by a cron job.
A current limitation of Civi + Aegir is that it only provisions Drupal + Civi in the same database. However, a pre-existing site will migrate appropriately.
Aegir will roll back everything on a failed upgrade
CiviCRM cron support is still in development, it already runs Drupal cron. You don't want all your cron jobs to run simultaneously on a multi-site installation.
You can migrate an installation across Aegir installations
Questions:
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If someone like PT did hosting through an organization like Koumbit, would we have the ability to create our own platforms etc.?
What's the upgrade path for Aegir?