[icedata]

I deployed the open-source version of Canvas for use at a summer course at a university in Beijing (it was done remotely). Just getting it installed was the hardest part. We hosted on Alibaba in Hong Kong (no web site license required there). Support for the open-source version comes via IRC and was actually quite good. Show-stopper was a rapidly growing log file (due to a persistent error I couldn't figure out). Eventually had to create a cron job to regularly truncate it. Apart from that it was pretty solid. The other tricky thing was getting outbound email to work (not very well documented). Persistence pays.