Sitecore more for corporate users? [closed]

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First, I've looked at every other stack site and I can't seem to find an very appropriate place to ask this. It's a pretty general questions, but basically, I'm wondering if Sitecore is targeted mainly at corporate users?

I've done a bit with Drupal and because it's open source of course you can install it on any shared host (at least LAMP but I guess Windows as well). I can't seem to find a lot of sites that advertize hosting for Sitecore other than the limited number on the SiteCore hosting site.

The only ones I see prices for tend to be WAY more than what you get from a shared host. IE, $100+ per month vs. ~$10-20 for your typical LAMP Shared host.

I'm about to get some Sitecore work at my company, and wondering if I'm going to be able to do any playing on my own with Sitecore outside of work, but it seems this is something you don't play with unless you have an actual license and host, unless there's some test environment one can set up on your local box, or is this not feasible?

As you can see, these are fairly basic questions, but I could not find good immediate answers to them while searching, so any good basic primer or info would be great!

Answer 1

Sitecore is an enterprise level web content management system (or Customer Engagement Platform as they call it). The license fees vary per country and setup, but start at around $20k.

If you want to play with Sitecore as a developer, you can ask them for the Sitecore Xpress edition. It's a free, limited release for developers. You need to contact Sitecore and they will give it to you.

Answer 2

For non-commercial use you can use Sitecore Express. You'll have to contact Sitecore to get this.

This is a scaled back version though.
From their site:

Xpress is a version of Sitecore’s CMS that has been seriously scaled back, but is ideal for developers wanting a no cost version and are OK with the restrictions. While the enterprise scalability and performance power has been pulled out, as well as the business user/marketing capabilities, the developer flexibility remains.

I don't know about the cost of hosting it.

Answer 3

As the others have mentioned, there are ways to get the software without a license, but traditionally developers work with this with a license.

At that point, you do not need to worry about hosting, as long as you can run a .NET web application on your machine. Sitecore runs in IIS with SQL Server or Oracle databases. This allows you to do all your development and playing around on your local machine without needing to have it hosted.

Answer 4

In my experience, your best bet for short term hosting of Sitecore is a service like Amazon EC2. A service like this gives to access to remote server space where you can install Sitecore and all the extras you may need.

This sounds like a good fit in your case since you can start and stop the service whenever you need. This will allow you to play around with Sitecore without a large upfront investment. Also, you can always start up a new server instance whenever you need an outward facing site to show clients.