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Heroku for PHP - Private Beta Signup
- cardmagic 16y agoHey fellow hackers, would love your feedback for making this a killer service.
- cwilson 16y agoToss me an invite and I'll much more feedback to give! Just signed up with cullenw at gmail dot com
- etherealG 16y agoI have tons of ideas about what you could do, but who knows, maybe you've done those things already :) I'd also love an invite, sheldon dot els at gmail dot com
- tlack 16y agoPrefer scp/sftp over git. Am I supposed to publish site assets like 20gb of images in git? You can still trigger server-side actions when a file is pushed if you allow ssh. Other than that, more details on the service would be nice. How do you scale MySQL for instance? I'm a technical guy so low level details are an important aspect for me.
- shaunxcode 16y agoyeah that would be pretty cool if they worked w/ fathomdb for mysql as part of the cost.
- bphogan 16y agoWith Heroku, you'd store those 20gb of images on S3. Then you have thm in development as well as production. And once they're up, you don't have to move them around.
- noodle 16y agotough to give feedback when the app isn't open for usage yet. there's potential, though, clearly.
- dpcan 16y agoHow is this going to be different than Fantastico that already comes with just about every CPanel hosting solution? I don't know many hosts that don't allow 1-click install of tons of PHP apps already. I think Heroku mattered because of Ruby... right?
- noodle 16y agofantastico installs programs. i think the point of phpfog is to completely handle all aspects of the server and scaling it so that you can work on developing the application.
- dpcan 16y agoFantastico really only works if it's part of the hosting solution. If you sign-up with any shared host offering CPanel, you'll probably have Fantastico, so basically, every CPanel host IS phpfog. Sign-up, click to install WordPress, or whatever, and you're good to start customizing.
- cardmagic 16y agoCPanel does not scale your websites nor does it help deploy changes.
- k33n 16y agoThree words. Make. Magento. Fast.
- cmelbye 16y agolike Heroku, but better Somehow I doubt that, but the service looks interesting. I wonder if there is a market for high quality PHP hosting.
- enntwo 16y agoI have to agree. I really like the concept of the service, and I am sure it will find some niches, but I don't think I have ever considered "...like X, but better..." a strong marketing argument. I would suggest just comparing it to Heroku and then specifying how your service is different, instead of making a claim about how one should be valued over the other. Best of luck regardless.
- dotBen 16y ago"Like Heroku but for PHP" would have been a less arrogant slogan IMHO. Actually a lot of top tier websites are built in PHP (Facebook's front end is a good example) and so I don't doubt there is middle tail in there that might jump on a Heroku-style managed black box hosting platform.
- cmelbye 16y agoThe only reason they can use PHP in the front end is because they have a lot of different backend and frontend services to compensate for it speed-wise. Facebook uses HipHop, backend services written with C/Java/etc(?), and lots of interesting frontend JavaScript stuff to speed up page loads. Wikipedia has literally hundreds of Squid servers to cache requests, so most visitors never touch code that was just generated with PHP. Needless to say, this would be unlikely to be possibly using PHP Fog. (This comment sort of turned into a PHP is slow argument, oops. My point should still come across though)
- larrywright 16y agoIt's also not quantified in any way. Better how? Overall, the marketing copy there is really weak. Lots of fluff, not enough structure, and way too light on details.
- k33n 16y ago
- jqueryin 16y agoThe details are minimal in regards to what happens between pushing changes in git and the source code being updated in the cloud. Could you elaborate?
- qeorge 16y agoPut in my email for an invite, its going to come down to pricing. My initial skepticism is that deploying PHP apps is easy, and Fantastico already gives us 1-click installs for stuff like Drupal and Wordpress. So you'll have to provide all the value on the sysadmin side. However, we do have a couple of apps that require load balancing. I'm pretty happy with the dedicated server and load balancing prices we get from WiredTree already, but I'm always looking for new opportunities.
- whalesalad 16y agoThe benefit here is the git integration. I'd also assume that the control panel is going to be thousands of times easier to use and more efficient than Cpanel/Fantastico (which is pretty gross in my opinion) I also dropped my email address in out of interest, but I agree this is definitely something that isn't needed for PHP. The web that we have right now was built for PHP. 99.9999% of hosts support it out of the box, and offer one click installs. If you're running your own app, it's just as easy to get that running with PHP. What we really need is a Heroku for PYTHON! And Google App Engine is NOT the answer.
- ianb 16y agoPython? Come help! http://cloudsilverlining.org http://cloudsilverlining.org
- dotBen 16y agoWhy is Google App Engine not the answer for Python? Is it "the man" element or is there something at a technical level you don't like or missing?
- mseebach 16y agoGoogle limits you to using their own key/value store instead of a regular, relational DB. This makes it hard to migrate to and from GAE, so there's a fair bit of vendor lock-in. A Heroku app can run anywhere else, out of the box.
- silvertab 16y agoInteresting idea! I'm curious to see what exactly this service provides (considering PHP deployment isn't exactly hard, as others mentioned). I would certainly love to see such a setup for Python frameworks...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- pclark 16y agothis feels very similar to Fantastico?
- pclark 16y agoalso no screenshots, no video, no hands on? boo.
- mdasen 16y agoI don't think there's a huge market for what Heroku does in the PHP world. With Rails, you want to run it as a long-running process. The amount of time to spin up a (Thin|Mongrel|Unicorn|etc.) is too long to do it based on a user request for a page and it's why Rails isn't run as a CGI. PHP is a bit different. The language is typically embedded in the server and then the individual files are parsed and run. There's little configuration other than uploading the files since the server can just interpret the files ending in ".php". Heroku needs to be able to put your application code on multiple servers and know which servers are responsible for your application. When one of your Thins isn't working, they need to kill it and spawn a new one, potentially on a new server and make sure they update their routing table. It's a tad complicated. PHP Fog doesn't have to do much. Heroku is running around 65,000 applications. Assuming that applications are under 30MB (for the hard drive), a RAID-1 with 2TB drives on every server they have would do the trick with a simple load balancer sending requests to a random server would do the trick. Your code is resident on their 15 app servers, a request comes in and gets routed to a random one, it parses your PHP and returns a response. The application isn't in memory as a long-running process like it is with Rails. Heroku already just has shared or dedicated database servers. There's no fancy process monitoring that you need since you only have to ensure that Apache is still going strong. But that's also why PHP Fog won't do as well. They aren't taking on as difficult a challenge as Heroku. They don't need to run something like god or monit to monitor lots of user processes. They don't need to pre-spawn application servers. They don't need fancy routing to keep track of what domain is being requested, what application belongs to that domain, and on what server that application is located. Because PHP doesn't usually involve long-running processes, it's taken care of for them. In fact, there are services like this already such as Rackspace's Cloud Sites (which puts your PHP or ASP code on multiple boxes, has a shared database, and loadbalances it). The same situation exists with Media Temple's Grid Service. Media Temple says, "hundreds of servers for the price of one". That's possible because the application code takes up such little space and can be easily replicated since it doesn't store state. Rails and Django users on Media Temple have to buy a "container" which comes with a certain amount of RAM on a specific box - because they need to keep the application in memory. Rails deployment will get a lot more people on board because it's more difficult to do. You have to manage application processes. PHP deployment is already seen as something that "just works". And if someone is going to argue that this "just works" a little better, wait until different users are expecting different php.ini stuff - or they expect to be able to save to the local filesystem because that's what the code they downloaded does or do a highly insecure cross-domain require or all of the various things that can't "just work". They could still be a very good webhost, but they aren't solving the same problem as Heroku and others (including Media Temple and Rackspace) have already gone the multi-server, auto-load-balanced and managed failover route for PHP (just not using git).
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- bgnm2000 16y agoSeems insane and rude to say its better than Heroku, the service which clearly inspired yours.
- Raisin 16y agoAnyone know of a django/python set up like these?
- GVRV 16y agoSee if maybe http://kutoken.com/ http://kutoken.com/ fits the bill.
- tlrobinson 16y agoIf all you want is the git deployment workflow it's incredibly easy to do on any host that give you SSH access (including shared hosts): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/279169/deploy-php-using-git#327315 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/279169/deploy-php-using-g... I've been using this on my personal site and it works great.
- jared314 16y agoSomeone needs to build a Heroku for Clojure.
- billclerico 16y agosince rails has so much convention, you can write a system that scales it as long as peopel follow that convention. PHP is a free for all. Different frameworks do things differently and need to be scaled differently. Lots of people don't use frameworks. I think it will be hard to write a "one size fits all" infrastructure solution for PHP, like what Heroku did for Rails.
- SingAlong 16y agothe problem that PHP doesn't have is configuring the environment to run it. You just install a few pkgs and boom! Even plugins come in php itself and aren't seperately pkged. There's no gems, no seperate server to serve the ruby backend. Just upload/push your code and it'll run. And any cheap host would do it. The _only_ advantage I see here is that I can increase my resources for the app (if it's like heroku) just with the click of a button without restarting the server. But I can't wait to be proved wrong. All the best guys :)
- pbiggar 16y agoThis will be very popular. Proof: http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list?can=2&q=&sort=-stars http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list?can=2&#... I briefly considered making this, and the Python equivalent. Warning: I have worked extensively with PHP internals, and you are going to have a very bad time making this safe and secure. I would suggest you add an option to use HipHop, the Facebook compiler, as an option. That would be a great selling point.