Symphony.

Last week on our developer podcast, Alistair and I spoke about taking Symphony into the next phase. We mentioned that the system has gone through a five year live-cycle and has been put through its paces on large-scale, high load websites and has come out better, stronger and awesomer with each iteration. The community has also grown with us over the years -- in a linear and non-server crashing rate -- now able to co-develop Symphony alongside the core team. And now we want to take that next logical step: thinking business.

We start our journey with Symphony compatible hosts.

I won't deny it, Symphony's core team is made up of engineers who predominantly like to smack things with wrenches. Business has always been an afterthought like a giant, growing elephant in the room that occasionally shrinks when we poke at it some. We knew that inevitably we would have to address this at some point but keep telling ourselves we'll get to it when Symphony reaches stability. It's five years now and the elephant's girth has grown dangerously lethal. Thankfully our marriage with Airlock meant that we had extra sets of poking hands but Symphony must be self-sustainable if we want to take Symphony to the heights of our expectations.

Of course, nothing we do here at planet Symphony is ever standard practise and the same goes for our commercialisation efforts. We have come up with a handful of revenue generating experiments. What we want to do is roll out each of these quick and easily reveriseble experiments to see what works and what doesn't. As we roll each one out, we'll blog about it and follow its progress. Hopefully it will be educational for both us and the community at large.

Our first experiment is the Symphony compatible hosts page. We have partnered with a website that reviews web hosts. They have provided us with an XML feed that lists all Symphony friendly hosts. Providing a compatible hosts page had always been in the back of our minds and to an extent we've tried it in the past with our old Wiki. However, nothing beats having a group of professionals doing the work for you.

In the interest of disclosure and keeping to the point of the commercial labs exercise, webhostingsearch.com is a sponsor of our site. Every click will generate some revenue for us. We can't disclose details of rates and such (hey, it takes two to tango and whilst we're happy to bare ourselves we need to respect our dance partner!) but based on our understanding of the industry standards, it's more than fair.

So there you have it, our first venture into helping ourselves!