best practices for hosting and deploying plone

Plone is one of the easiest CMSes to download and install on your local machine, but when you need to deploy it to a production server you need to learn about Apache vhosts, caching proxies, load balancing, logfile rotation, database packing, backups and security issues. That's a lot to learn just to host a Plone site! The good news is that much of this complexity can be solved by the effective use of buildout recipes and OS packages. We will look at a working buildout example to see how to put these recipes [1] to use in a production environment, including tools [2] to monitor your site and alert you when it's having problems. Once your site is deployed, you need to perform regular updates both to Plone and the OS. We will discuss how to best deploy changes to your production server in a consistent and failsafe way, including releasing eggs to your own egg server so that you aren't dependent on the cheeseshop. Imagine with one command being able to launch a new virtual machine that installs an entire production environment including your custom Plone site in a matter of minutes!? We will look at some of these emerging tools [3] and discuss how they simplify the deployment story. This talk will benefit those who want to learn about various Plone hosting options (own servers, VPS, Amazon EC2), and ways to optimize the monitoring and deployment of your Plone sites. And for those Plone hosting veterans, you might learn a few new tricks to make your job easier and save time and money.