Well, there *is* several options in the world for rather cheap IBM i based hosting
<vendor response>we have offerings start at EUR 99 monthly with limited support but *secadm</vendor response>
But there is some points to consider (i assume i also speak for the colleagues also offering hosting):
* IBM i is not for free. We must pay IBM $$$ for the OS, for the Hardware, and even for WDS (i do not want to start discussing about IBM marketing strategy here)
* each hosting offering has infrastructure cost. We do volunteer the community not only pub400.com - there is some more systems which are not that public; Calvin does know ;-)
In the 20+ years of offering entry-level IBM i hosting we learned some bits i need to rant about:
* regardless how cheap you try to make an offer for developers (or admins) to jump into the system, it's always too expensive for some of them (we had a EUR 69 deal some time ago)
* when someone new to administering an IBM i rents a dedicated LPAR and starts peeking around, they loose interest and stop using the system after some weeks. IBM i is too complex (not complicated) to simply do learning by doing on a test environment without a practical job to be done
* the effort in time to support new IBM i users (pgm or adm) can be very hard, in average we invest about 50-70 hours a month without getting money for that. Sometimes we get a "thank you". A lot of people seem to expect to get help from us instead of trying to use $search-engine
* very interesting: there is a lot of people wanting to learn administering IBM i; almost same number than people wanting to learn programming the i. To be honest: we need 10 times the programmers than admins to keep the system seen in the market. We need programmers with keen projects (language is not a topic to discuss) and talk about them.
* The IBM i system and market is for business. It's that simple. So we need people think about business applications; at least here in Germany students in business administration do not learn anything about different systems, OSes and languages. If the do learn about computer systems, they (maybe) learn about SAP. And their understanding about computer systems is "they run". If you try to tell them about reliability differences between Win, Linux and i, their technical understanding usually stops after the first minute :)
* We get a lot of feedback of people who used pub400 for starting exploring the i; even started a career as programmer. We are glad about that we were able to help. We also would be glad if these people spread the word about i in general.
* running pub400.com makes some work. But to be honest: would anyone of you run a Linux or Windows box open to the whole internet with ability to create and run programs? ;-)
I hope this discussion will not only be limited to this newsgroup, go out and spread the IBM i word!
-h
(now leaving for bed. 02:42am here)
Am 07.03.2020 um 01:57 schrieb Patrik Schindler <poc@xxxxxxxxxx>:
Still, for many hobbyists out there, an initial offering like Holger's pub400 is really great, as long as you're content to be a simple user: No administrative tasks allowed. I guess there are more "cloud" options like to have your own LPAR, but I honestly don't know about these.
midrange.com
