Plone system requirements

by Mikko Ohtamaa — last modified Oct 03, 2012 07:57 AM

This document outlines the hardware and operating system basics required to run Plone.

To run a Plone based web site on your own server you need:

A server machine connected to Internet (public sites) or your intranet (company intranet sites) with administrator access (root on UNIX systems)
Remote console, like SSH access, for installing Plone. FTP is not enough.

Low end hosting provides don't usually give you root access. You need to have Plone-specific hosting provider or a server with full administrative access.

For cheap virtual private servers with root access see www.lowendbox.com - prices starts as low as 7 USD / month
If you do not want to maintain the server yourself and you need a single click cloud solution please see Ploud service http://www.ploud.com
For more information see FAQ Where can I host my Plone site.

Operating system requirements

Windows XP or later
OSX 10.4.x or later
Linux 2.6.x or later
Python 2.6 (optionally Python 2.7 for Plone 4.2 and above)

Plone requires development tools (GCC) and several other dependencies on Mac OS X and Linux. These include:

libjpeg
readline
zlib
libbz2
libxslt
libxml2
python dev library

It's recommend to use your system's package manager to deploy these dependencies. If you need further instructions to install these packages please reference: Installing Plone.

Note

Plone requires Python 2.6 or 2.7. Development tools are required for Linux (GCC).

Hardware requirements

The hardware requirements below give a rough estimation of the minimum hardware setup needed for a Plone server.

Add-on products and caching solutions may increase RAM requirements.

One Zope application server is able to run several Plone sites with the same software configuration. This lowers the requirements when hosting multiple sites on the same server.

Minimum hardware requirements

Minimum 256 MB RAM and 512 MB of swap space per Plone site
Minimum 512 MB hard disk space

Recommended hardware

2 GB or more RAM per Plone site
40 GB or more hard disk space

Note

Plone scales readily. If you are developing a high traffic site, plan your infrastructure to take advantage of its key technologies such as ZEO server and other strategies including load balancing and caching.

Hosting solutions

Please see plone.net for commercial hosting providers or pick any server or virtual server solution filling the hardware requirements.