Mirroring this site

Contents
Benefits
Requirements
Requesting to host a new mirror

Benefits

Hosting a mirror of this site can be beneficial not only to the site users but also to the hosting institution.

Contribute to the future of the site

The audience of the site is growing exponentially. To deal with the growth, the non-personalized pages are served as static HTML and image files. However, with the continued growth, soon or later the site will require more hardware to serve its content. Mirrors can help and contribute to a better future of the site by off-loading the service of non-personalized content. This way the main site can continue to work smoothly without requiring any investment on hardware for which there is no budget.
Promotion within the regional PHP community

Mirror hosts are listed for user selection, grouped according to their country. Users tend to choose mirrors that are geographically closer to the region where they are located. This represents an opportunity for mirror hosts to promote themselves better within the community of users of the same region.
Free advertisement for the mirror host institution

The banners on the top right corner of all pages of the site is reserved for partners. The site pages hosted in mirror sites display the banner of the hosting institution in the spot of the partners banner. This represents an opportunity to advertise for free the activity of mirroring institutions that provide services that may interest to the audience of the site like: PHP hosting services, PHP training, PHP consulting, PHP job sites or any other type of PHP or Open Source related sites.

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Requirements

Hosting mirror candidates must satisfy a few technical requirements.

Own domain

The links of the site pages assume that it is hosted in a server with a domain of its own. It may be hosted in a virtual host sharing the same IP address, but the site must have its own domain. It may be anything like for instance phpclasses.mycompany.com .
Operating system and Web server

The operating system and the type of Web server used to host the mirror may be anything as long as the Web server supports PHP. So, it does not need to run under Linux or Apache. It may even run under Windows with Microsoft IIS. It will almost only serve static HTML files and images. The only PHP script that it may need to serve is used to redirect the accesses to the main site when a requested page is not yet available because of synchronization delays. That script may be served with PHP running under safe mode.
Disk space

Currently all the mirrored pages of the site require less than 200MB of disk space, but it is recommended to reserve at least 250MB to anticipate future growth.
Bandwidth

At the time when this text was written (March 2005), the main server was using a bandwidth of about 100GB . Considering that only the accesses of non-logged users are redirected to mirrors, it is assumed that no more than 25% of the accesses to the site pages will be handled by mirror sites. Usually, the users pick mirrors that are geographically closer to their location. Consider that only a part of the site audience located near your region will pick your mirror. That part may even be split by other mirrors in the same region. Take a look at the site statistics page to have an idea of what may be the percentage of users that may pick your mirror. Mirrors should not need to serve more than 1GB a month added an average growth of 5% every month.
Synchronization with rsync

The mirror site files are made available via a rsync server. Mirror hosts should be able to synchronize by connecting regularly to the site rsync server. Nobody is authorized to change the mirrored data nor redistribute it in any other way than by serving it from the mirror site.
Update frequency

Mirror hosts should synchronize the site files at least once a day to be considered upto date. Updates should not happen more than once per hour to not overload the rsync server.

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Requesting to host a new mirror

If you want to host a mirror or the site and you are able to satisfy the mirroring requirements, just fill and submit the mirror request form.

Responsible access name

For each mirror there must be a person responsible for its maintenance. That person should already be subscribed to the site. The responsible access name is the access name that the person in charge uses login the site.
Institution name

A mirror may be hosted by an institution that may be a company, a university, etc., or may be an individual. If the mirror will be hosted by an institution, the person in charge of the mirror must have an authorization from an institution manager before the mirroring is started. If the mirror is being hosted by an individual, he must have an authorization from the ISP responsible by the machine and network of the mirror host server.
Institution activity

Short description of the main activity institution or the individual responsible for hosting the mirror. For instance: PHP hosting company, PHP consulting and training, University, etc.. This description text will be used in conjunction with the institution name to form the mirror host banners images alternative text.
Mirror domain

Domain name of the mirror host. Usually it is something like phpclasses.mycompany.com . This domain name and the server must be ready when the request to host a mirror is submitted. The domain name will be resolved to figure the server IP address. That IP address will be used to determine where in the world the server is located. Notice that the mirror host will be listed with that location even if the institution responsible for the domain is located in a different location or even a different country. That is necessary to provide the most accurate information about the distance from the network of the computer of each user to the location of each mirror in the world.
Institution home page

URL of the home page of the institution that is responsible for hosting the mirror. This URL will be used to link the banners of the mirror host in the mirrored pages.
Institution banner image

URL of a remote image to be used as banner of the mirror host in the mirrored pages. The image must be in the format GIF (animated or not), JPEG or PNG. It must not exceed 10KB and the size must be of 120x60. Since the image will always be served remotely, mirror hosts may rotate the image that is served, as long as it is always related to the institution responsible for the mirror.

Contents

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Choose a mirror site

Would you like to host a mirror of this site?

Contents

Benefits

Contribute to the future of the site

Promotion within the regional PHP community

Free advertisement for the mirror host institution

Requirements

Own domain

Operating system and Web server

Disk space

Bandwidth

Synchronization with rsync

Update frequency

Requesting to host a new mirror

Responsible access name

Institution name

Institution activity

Mirror domain

Institution home page

Institution banner image