Is your user group currently hosting their website that isn’t giving you the features that you need?
Is your user group currently paying to much (or anything) for your website?
Would your user group to be able to be hosted for free, on a WordPress platform where you can have basically any theme, and any plugin available to you?
Have I got a deal for you.
Several people that I know run user groups, and they haven’t been happy with their hosting solutions for one reason or another. So I decided to do something about it. So I’ve put together the website SQLUGS.com (SQL User Groups) which will happily allow you to run your own website as something.sqlugs.com for free (we’ll be happy to host for other user groups as well, if you’d like to be hosted here as well). This platform is a WordPress powered solution with each subdomain as a network website so you get all the power of our already configured MySQL cluster which we have build and the web tier is built on an Azure Web App so it’ll scale beautifully as load comes and goes throughout the day.
Currently we’ve got a few plugins and themes configured. If you want different themes and plugins just let us know via the support page and we’ll get them added to the site (it’s a requirement of WordPress that only the site owner installs plugins and themes as it’s a shared codebase). But we’ll be happy to install anything on the environment as long as it doesn’t adversely impact performance of the rest of the network. As new plugins are installed you’ll have control of which ones you have enabled on your sites. We have a few turned on which are mandatory, which are mostly security related or infrastructure related (backups, forcing SSL when you login, etc.).
If you would like to host your user groups website in our network, just fill out the request form and we’ll get you setup as quickly as we can (we don’t have auto signup enabled because of spammers, scammers, etc).
Does your user group have their own domain name currently that you want to use to use? No problem, we support that as well. It just takes a little more work to setup on our side. If you want SSL for your domain we can do that as well, but we’ll require that you provide the SSL Certificate (we provide one for your something.sqlugs.com site). As long as there’s no charge for us to host it in Azure, then there’s no charge to the user group (based on pricing changes for SSL last week SSL certs should be free unless the pricing changes again).
We hope that you’ll take us up on our free hosting for your user groups.
Denny
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