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I am also confused. What are the benefits of phpfog if it normally only takes 15 min to create a linux server with php/mysql on amazon ec2? The only things I co

I am also confused. What are the benefits of phpfog if it normally only takes 15 min to create a linux server with php/mysql on amazon ec2? The only things I could see different are db slave replication and http caching, but generally those you don't worry till much later, and are not critical.

aheilbut 16y ago
Does it really take that much time to create a linux server with rails on EC2? Energy barriers seem to matter.
mikey_p 16y ago
I think most of the people that could do that for the LAMP stack could probably get through setting up a Ruby or node server without too much extra time. Also, once you're done it, how hard is it do repeat? Yet I don't see folks making these same arguments against Heroku. One of the key points I got from talking to Lucas is that he's focusing not just on scalability, but HA, which is something that while not hard to do for the LAMP stack, isn't trivial either (usually it's just a matter of time spent setting it up). The other neat (or annoying step) is that PHPFog goes the git route for handling your code. Just signing up and creating a site puts a default codebase for the platform you've selected into your git repo, and you just check it out, and commit to get started.
gexla 16y ago
With Phusion Passenger, a Ruby environment is just as easy to setup these days as PHP. Back when Heroku first started, I don't think Phusion Passenger existed. However, the point of these services isn't necessarily to save the developer from having to setup these environments, but rather it's to save the developer from worrying about having to setup a solid, scalable production setup. You still should have a development setup which lives somewhere other than Heroku.
loganlinn 16y ago
From http://www.phpfog.com/pricing http://www.phpfog.com/pricing: "We will provide simple one-click installations of some of the most popular PHP applications out there." I'd say that taking a 'Heroku clone' approach might work against them. Their biggest feature may be the ability to easily install and deploy pre-existing PHP products like Joomla, Drupal, vBulletin, etc. People that use these commercial PHP projects are likely to appreciate such a service for many reasons. In a way, they are capturing a lot of the value that cPanel offers.
alanstorm 16y ago
If you haven't been paying much attention to EC2 until now, getting your head around the pricing structure, what plan makes sense, and the whole "You have a VM but no permanent disk" thing can take some time. PHPFog's value proposition would seem to be "We've figured out EC2 for you, and have default VMs setup for Drupal and Wordpress and a way to deal with those system's need for permanent disk space. If you can get your code in a git repository we'll handle the rest." Just getting Drupal and Wordpress out of a shared hosting environment is a huge win security/stability wise, and if their VMs have a configuration that deals with a lot of the well known attack vectors that aren't shared host related all the better. I'm not sure that I'd use it myself, because I'd like to spend to time to get familiar with EC2, but with shared hosting becoming a less reliable solution as internet traffic patterns change (and shared hosts increasingly go he commodity route) there's going to be a lot of PHP professionals (and PHP hacks, and non-programmer hacks using PHP systems) looking for a turn-key cloud solution, so I can see the interest in PHPFog. TL;DR: There's large swaths of the PHP community that doesn't know how to make EC2 work, PHPFog is aiming to be their middleman.
- Keyframe 16y ago
  getting your head around the pricing structure, what plan makes sense, and the whole "You have a VM but no permanent disk" thing can take some time. Yeah, an hour or so? Seriously, I still don't get it. There is also this: https://hub.turnkeylinux.org/ https://hub.turnkeylinux.org/ from http://www.turnkeylinux.org/ http://www.turnkeylinux.org/ guys. Haven't tried it myself yet, but I really like what they did with turnkeylinux images, they're absolutely amazing for what they are (time savers).
  - alanstorm 16y ago
    When you "don't get it" do you mean for yourself, or for the market? If the former, you can stop reading, because for someone already up on EC2 and devops it doesn't make sense to insert a middle man. If it's the later, here's more to consider. I think you misunderstanding may step from underestimating the time needed to make the right choice on an EC2 Cloud vs. Slicehost VM vs. Rackspace vs. Shared hosting vs. That guy with the space space in his rack for a PHP application. For someone not up on EC2 they need to research what the difference between a Standard On-Demand Instance, Micro On-Demand Instance, High-Memory On-Demand Instance, High-CPU On-Demand Instance, Cluster Compute Instance, and Cluster GPU Instance is, and then decide which type of VM they need within that sub-group for their app. Then they need to figure out where their application touches/stores items on the file system, and decide how they're going to restore that whenever they spawn/restart another EC2 instance. (file uploads, avatar image uploads, etc.) Lots of PHP applications make an assumption about about a readable/writable persistant file system (which, coincidentally, is why shared hosting is such a successful attack vector). The is where PHPFog having the Drupal and Wordpress installs come in handy, the implication there being they've solved that for you. To get familiar with the EC2 infrastructure to make these choices, they need to make a $63/month investment or pony up the $227.50. Minor, but expensive enough that it creates inertia. If PHPFog gets their pricing right, or they have a compelling marketing pitch that this really is turn-key, they can capture a lot of mindshare right now, and possibly be a disruptive player in a segment of the shared hosting market that's been static for a long time. None of the above is hard for a technically competent individual, it just takes time. It's plumbing, and (this is the important part), in the world of a PHP developer it's the sort of plumbing that up-till-now can be handled by a reliable shared host, or for larger companies/teams/apps, server operations folks who don't do application programming. That's why there's a lack of EC2 knowledge even among competent profesional PHP folks. Add in all the people just using Drupal/Wordpress/Joomla/Magento/etc who aren't technically competent and you have a another market segment PHPFog could serve. Are we looking at a $212 acquisition for PHPFog? Probably not. But that doesn't mean they can't be a successful company, or that they can't use a cash infusion to get the tedious-yet-requiring-a-brain work for getting default installations for all the popular PHP applications running.
noodle 16y ago
phpfog right now is offering the "don't worry about until much later" benefits as their main selling point, which is the reason why i'm not currently using them, but they have promise if they can bring their concept/model down to smaller apps

aheilbut 16y ago

Does it really take that much time to create a linux server with rails on EC2? Energy barriers seem to matter.

mikey_p 16y ago

I think most of the people that could do that for the LAMP stack could probably get through setting up a Ruby or node server without too much extra time. Also, once you're done it, how hard is it do repeat? Yet I don't see folks making these same arguments against Heroku. One of the key points I got from talking to Lucas is that he's focusing not just on scalability, but HA, which is something that while not hard to do for the LAMP stack, isn't trivial either (usually it's just a matter of time spent setting it up). The other neat (or annoying step) is that PHPFog goes the git route for handling your code. Just signing up and creating a site puts a default codebase for the platform you've selected into your git repo, and you just check it out, and commit to get started.

gexla 16y ago

With Phusion Passenger, a Ruby environment is just as easy to setup these days as PHP. Back when Heroku first started, I don't think Phusion Passenger existed. However, the point of these services isn't necessarily to save the developer from having to setup these environments, but rather it's to save the developer from worrying about having to setup a solid, scalable production setup. You still should have a development setup which lives somewhere other than Heroku.

loganlinn 16y ago

From http://www.phpfog.com/pricing http://www.phpfog.com/pricing: "We will provide simple one-click installations of some of the most popular PHP applications out there." I'd say that taking a 'Heroku clone' approach might work against them. Their biggest feature may be the ability to easily install and deploy pre-existing PHP products like Joomla, Drupal, vBulletin, etc. People that use these commercial PHP projects are likely to appreciate such a service for many reasons. In a way, they are capturing a lot of the value that cPanel offers.

alanstorm 16y ago

If you haven't been paying much attention to EC2 until now, getting your head around the pricing structure, what plan makes sense, and the whole "You have a VM but no permanent disk" thing can take some time. PHPFog's value proposition would seem to be "We've figured out EC2 for you, and have default VMs setup for Drupal and Wordpress and a way to deal with those system's need for permanent disk space. If you can get your code in a git repository we'll handle the rest." Just getting Drupal and Wordpress out of a shared hosting environment is a huge win security/stability wise, and if their VMs have a configuration that deals with a lot of the well known attack vectors that aren't shared host related all the better. I'm not sure that I'd use it myself, because I'd like to spend to time to get familiar with EC2, but with shared hosting becoming a less reliable solution as internet traffic patterns change (and shared hosts increasingly go he commodity route) there's going to be a lot of PHP professionals (and PHP hacks, and non-programmer hacks using PHP systems) looking for a turn-key cloud solution, so I can see the interest in PHPFog. TL;DR: There's large swaths of the PHP community that doesn't know how to make EC2 work, PHPFog is aiming to be their middleman.

Keyframe 16y ago
getting your head around the pricing structure, what plan makes sense, and the whole "You have a VM but no permanent disk" thing can take some time. Yeah, an hour or so? Seriously, I still don't get it. There is also this: https://hub.turnkeylinux.org/ https://hub.turnkeylinux.org/ from http://www.turnkeylinux.org/ http://www.turnkeylinux.org/ guys. Haven't tried it myself yet, but I really like what they did with turnkeylinux images, they're absolutely amazing for what they are (time savers).
- alanstorm 16y ago
  When you "don't get it" do you mean for yourself, or for the market? If the former, you can stop reading, because for someone already up on EC2 and devops it doesn't make sense to insert a middle man. If it's the later, here's more to consider. I think you misunderstanding may step from underestimating the time needed to make the right choice on an EC2 Cloud vs. Slicehost VM vs. Rackspace vs. Shared hosting vs. That guy with the space space in his rack for a PHP application. For someone not up on EC2 they need to research what the difference between a Standard On-Demand Instance, Micro On-Demand Instance, High-Memory On-Demand Instance, High-CPU On-Demand Instance, Cluster Compute Instance, and Cluster GPU Instance is, and then decide which type of VM they need within that sub-group for their app. Then they need to figure out where their application touches/stores items on the file system, and decide how they're going to restore that whenever they spawn/restart another EC2 instance. (file uploads, avatar image uploads, etc.) Lots of PHP applications make an assumption about about a readable/writable persistant file system (which, coincidentally, is why shared hosting is such a successful attack vector). The is where PHPFog having the Drupal and Wordpress installs come in handy, the implication there being they've solved that for you. To get familiar with the EC2 infrastructure to make these choices, they need to make a $63/month investment or pony up the $227.50. Minor, but expensive enough that it creates inertia. If PHPFog gets their pricing right, or they have a compelling marketing pitch that this really is turn-key, they can capture a lot of mindshare right now, and possibly be a disruptive player in a segment of the shared hosting market that's been static for a long time. None of the above is hard for a technically competent individual, it just takes time. It's plumbing, and (this is the important part), in the world of a PHP developer it's the sort of plumbing that up-till-now can be handled by a reliable shared host, or for larger companies/teams/apps, server operations folks who don't do application programming. That's why there's a lack of EC2 knowledge even among competent profesional PHP folks. Add in all the people just using Drupal/Wordpress/Joomla/Magento/etc who aren't technically competent and you have a another market segment PHPFog could serve. Are we looking at a $212 acquisition for PHPFog? Probably not. But that doesn't mean they can't be a successful company, or that they can't use a cash infusion to get the tedious-yet-requiring-a-brain work for getting default installations for all the popular PHP applications running.

noodle 16y ago

phpfog right now is offering the "don't worry about until much later" benefits as their main selling point, which is the reason why i'm not currently using them, but they have promise if they can bring their concept/model down to smaller apps