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AppFog Pricing Released
- grk 14y ago50 GB data transfer limit ($0.15/GB for additional resources) This looks like a potential moneymaker.
- Danieru 14y agoI would be very interested to know how their entry level plan is free and yet generous. I want it to be true, I want the numbers to work for them. I have a small site that does 70GB/month and this would somehow beat shared hosting (dreamhost in my case) at only $3/month for the extra 20GB. Yet this is even more generous than their phpfog offering. One thing I did not notice was any mention of disk usage. Either way I'll at least test them. I've been wanting to try out PaaS for a while.
- porter 14y agoBecause once you invest your time in their free plan, then you'll use them for every other site you have too. Heroku did this to me and so far it's worked out well for us both.
- lucperkins 14y agoThere's no mention of disk usage because it doesn't matter and has no effect on price. Pricing is based solely on RAM usage. The thing is, economies of scale in the infrastructure space have made this kind of pricing model extremely feasible on the PaaS side.
- malachismith 14y agoI think the answers are here: http://blog.appfog.com/if-paas-is-expensive-and-slow-why-not-use-a-vps/ http://blog.appfog.com/if-paas-is-expensive-and-slow-why-not...
- arunoda 14y agoThis is the one of the cheapest PAAS I've ever seen. How about the performance?
- fishcakes 14y agoWhat about reliability. A multi-az paas would dominate heroku at any price. Anyone know about reliability?
- shykes 14y agodotCloud (http://dotcloud.com http://dotcloud.com) is a paas that is natively multi-az. You can use that feature to reliably deploy ruby , php, nodejs, python, mysql, mongo, redis etc. It also has real support and a sustainable business model. (disclaimer: I work there)
- lucperkins 14y agoAppFog has "real" support (including live chat with all plans, including free plans). And the business model will prove to be quite sustainable (and bundled with a readily comprehensible pricing model).
- pixeloution 14y agoInteresting, at amazon's regular prices that works out to about $12/month in services they are giving away (assuming 3 year reserved servers), but they'd have to cram 34 clients on to a server. But now you're splitting 26 EC2 compute units 34 ways ... thats less processor power then a Micro.
- thisishugo 14y agoWithout the extremely aggressive throttling of a Micro instance, too; which means that one greedy app can bring everyone to a crawl.
- mechanical_fish 14y agoWe are looking the gift horse in the mouth. It's free. Yes, you will hit the limitations of the free plan very quickly indeed, at which point you should start paying. The idea of these free plans is to let tire-kickers try out the system. They don't have to pay to test drive the UX and deployment mechanisms, which are the value-added features that sell a platform like Appfog. They don't have to pay for low-traffic prototypes. They can launch a whole set of minimum-viable sites on free hardware and then upscale one within a few minutes of any traffic spike (in theory, anyway). And it empowers marketing maneuvers like getting an entire programming class of 25 people using your platform for a one-day class. (I'm not sure I love the above business plan, to say the least, but that's the idea, and thanks to Heroku it has become the standard.)
- lucperkins 14y agoI think that that's a good description overall, although I would add that the free plan allows deployment to all currently available IaaS and hence to do things like run analytics on the different infras to see what works best. But I would push back a little bit by saying that you can run apps getting some pretty legit traffic for free. It needn't be just "Hello world" or sandbox apps.
- wmf 14y agoI think that can be solved with cgroups.
- tapsboy 14y agoCustom domains are free too.. I am pleasantly suprised
- arunoda 14y agogiving away a lot. Not bad. a good move to get some attention.
- lucperkins 14y agoYou could say that. But it should be noted that what is currently free will always be free.
- balakk 14y agoInterestingly, database sizes seem to be lesser than RAM sizes in all the plans. Isn't that the exact opposite of what is needed in the real world?
- benmccann 14y agoI emailed them about this and they suggested placing my data in RDS or hosting it outside of AppFog in some other way and running only my app servers with their service.
- dsrguru 14y ago"Java, .Net, Ruby, Node, Python, PHP, etc." Does that "etc" include Clojure and Scala?
- rmason 14y agoHow about Railo or OpenBD? Please.
- human_error 14y ago"MySQL, Mongo, PostgreSQL, etc." I'd like to know what that "etc." stands for.
- lucperkins 14y agoThe "etc." simply means that we're looking to expand the number of database options over time beyond this list
- biot 14y agoRather than saying "etc." which makes it look like there are additional databases you currently support but are not listed, why not change it to "and more on the way" which clearly communicates what you mean?
- Poiesis 14y agoPostgreSQL does not seem to be available, despite their ad copy. Googling reveals that it's been in beta and they seem to be expecting to roll it out soon.
- suresk 14y agoSince Clojure and Scala both compile to Java bytecode, I would assume so.
- rabbitfang 14y agoI would hope so. Perhaps they should call those out to make it clearer?
- 14y ago
- jameswyse 14y agoAm I reading this right? I can start 16 instances of my app (with 128MB RAM each)? For Free?
- Scotchy 14y agoYes that is right, altough if you really need 16 instances then I would assume you would hit the 50GB quite easily.
- zakshay 14y agoSSL is still not available. Thats a biggie for me - https://support.appfog.com/entries/20952598-https https://support.appfog.com/entries/20952598-https No PostGres.(even though its in the documentation) Also IronWorker seems to be the only option for running background and cron jobs.
- wildtype 14y agoYay. lets begin the exodus (from other service provider free plan)!
- Smerity 14y agoThis could be quite a game changer. Other than the generous free allowance, the other big difference compared to Heroku is that it allows you to select the infrastructure you launch on, including three different global regions for AWS (Singapore, Ireland, Virginia). By providing an alternative for Heroku's high prices and the "region-lock" (latency is always a big issue for potential customers), AppFog seems set to be a strong competitor. More competitors in these spaces are always welcome! =]
- paukiatwee 14y agoIt would be game changer, since it provide other regions like Singapore, which is very welcome for huge potential Asia customers.
- lucperkins 14y agoYes. There are also plans to expand to Amazon-Tokyo and Rackspace-Hong Kong
- rabbitfang 14y agoI recently read that Heroku was considering going multi-region.
- lucperkins 14y agoThey might indeed do that. We'll see. Meanwhile, AppFog will be up and running on dozens of data centers by the end of 2012. Those currently available are just the beginning.
- mun2mun 14y agoI once tried to setup Symfony2 framework in PHPFog which is sister concern of AppFog. It did not went nicely. As Symfony2 generates classes in cache folder adding permission to that folder was tricky. Also have to clear the cache to push new changes. Dotcloud is better on this case. It gives shell access to both web server and db server.
- dekz 14y agoWhen choosing Rackspace + Ruby Sinatra I received this result: Sending... Registering App Details... Validating Uploading App 500 Things are not that 500 red number seems like an error code to me which doesn't provide me with much information.
- lucperkins 14y agoTry going into the console and seeing if the app is running anyway. Sometimes 500 errors spring up superfluously, even when things run fine. A small hiccup that we're working on aggressively.
- Jake232 14y agoSinatra really isn't working.
- lucperkins 14y agoWe worked hard on Sinatra support this past weekend. Give it another shot. I've deployed multiple test Sinatra apps painlessly today, which was admittedly far less painless last week.
- bbayer 14y agoSame response with the Rackspace + Python setup. App is showed up in dashboard but I couldn't start it. Created domain returns a 404 page.
- gary4gar 14y agoDoesn't work. Created a new App & yet that newly created app doesn't exist in dashboard. Tried creating app Multiple times, but same result. Screenshots: http://i.imgur.com/Z8Krw.png http://i.imgur.com/Z8Krw.png http://i.imgur.com/wocw7.png http://i.imgur.com/wocw7.png I would wish them luck!
- lucperkins 14y agoTrue, there are still glitches to be worked out. We just entered general availability a few days ago. I would encourage you to give it another shot. Errors of this sort tend to arise somewhat randomly.
- gary4gar 14y agoTried again, that error is gone but now I get another error. opening the app url in browser generates a '404 - page not found' Further, trying to update the app using 'af update' generates following error --> Starting Application 'appname': ..........................Error (JSON 503): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="u... seems like you have lot of bugs waiting to be fixed ;)
- level09 14y agoFree plan is too good to be true, it reminded me of Google Apps, their free plan started with unlimited users and they ended up with only 10. let's see how long they can afford this generosity,
- Alterlife 14y agoThe sister concern: phpfog charges [5$ a month for custom domains](http://appfog.com/products/phpfog/pricing/ http://appfog.com/products/phpfog/pricing/) on the same tier. I would guess they'll have to eventually pull a switch on that.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- qw 14y agoAfter signing up I got this text: Unlimited apps within 2GB RAM 10 each with 100 MB limit So it seems that each app can only use 100MB. It could be an example of course, but in that case they should make it more clear
- prydonius 14y agoI think it's talking about database storage there, but it would be silly to say unlimited apps as long as you don't have more than 10. EDIT It looks like there is a limit of 10 'services'.
- ya3r 14y agoThis is incorrect. You have a minimum of 100MB of RAM from each app. That gives you 10 apps (total: 2 GB) But If you have only 1 app, you can increase the memory quota for that instance to 2 GB.
- qw 14y agoYou're right. It was just a bit confusing to see it with no context. The service looks good. Hopefully they will add Redis at some point.
- Ecio78 14y agoIn the main page Redis is cited, it looks like they are based on Vmware's CloudFoundry, where I suppose Redis is a first class citizen
- lucperkins 14y agoSupport for Redis is indeed on the way and a very high priority
- frankwiles 14y agoNo where on this page does it REALLY explain what this product actually does. Marketing/copy fail. Even the about page you have to click around to find is more about their funding than what I gain from this product.
- Kiro 14y agoLet me help you out: http://www.appfog.com/ http://www.appfog.com/ Clear as can be.
- huragok 14y agoBeen using a lot of Dart lately, so I'm wondering if I could get a Dart VM running on AppFog. Since it's based on Java, there shouldn't be a problem, right?
- esente 14y agoNo integrated git-push deploy (I know you can use a gem with an extra instance to do that, but still). No SSH into your app. No custom app. Extra runtimes are there, but old (Erlang, for example), and no idea how to use them. Other than those, it's a very good PaaS.
- lucperkins 14y agoThe AppFog command line tool is very straightforward and even somewhat Git-like: http://docs.appfog.com/getting-started/af-cli http://docs.appfog.com/getting-started/af-cli. If the "af" gem is installed, "af push" is the equivalent to a "git push." You're right that it's not the same thing, but it's pretty handy. Extra runtimes (newer versions of Erlang, plus Perl, Go, etc.) will become available over time. They're high priorities for our dev team, as are Redis, Memcached, etc. What do you mean by "no custom app?"
- esente 14y agoRegarding git vs af, if I could use the git already installed in my computer, and by simply adding my SSH key into AppFog system, I could avoid using `af` gem and Ruby altogether. Otherwise, I would have to install Ruby just for this purpose. But this is just personal taste. Other PaaS such as Heroku or OpenShift allows you to set up a custom app. For example, you can create your own app type in Heroku's cedar stack with buildpacks, or the DIY app in OpenShift with supports for hooks. Erlang probably isn't on the top of the priorities list, but I'm looking forwards to it.
- lucperkins 14y agoBuild packs and GitHub hooks are also on the roadmap
- bbayer 14y agoI couldn't totally understand pricing model. You can get only twice of free plan when you agree to pay 100$ a month. Hetzner still seems logical, if you have enough passion to learn little bit server administration. http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex5 http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex5
- lucperkins 14y agoHetzner is simply not a platform-as-a-service. It might be a good deal for a server, but that's not what you're paying for with a PaaS like AppFog. What you're paying for is application lifecycle management, from deployment to scaling to cloning to re-deployment on a different infrastructure, to adding services (like Mongo, MySQL, etc.) at the click of a button. Serverraum alleine = etwas ganz ganz ganz anderes.
- bbayer 14y agoAgreed. As I write if you have will to learn Linux server management, you can easily achive what it offers. I can use PaaS if the price as low as not worth to do server administration. With same price point, I can have a real hardware with 12x more RAM and 1.5 TB disk cap and I can also add a skill to myself which is a good thing for long-term. Nowadays adding a service to your infrastructure is just an apt-get command. Deployment is easy as a git push. I totally understand who don't want to deal with terminals, config files etc. But as I said for me it is far from useful.
- Poiesis 14y agoDoes not seem to support SSL, which might be a bit of a dealbreaker for many.
- Ecio78 14y agoAny plan for SSL? And Apache Solr as a Service?
- m0shen 14y agoNo Perl support. But, it looks like it's a Cloud Foundry thing: http://cloudfoundry.org/search?q=perl http://cloudfoundry.org/search?q=perl
- lucperkins 14y agoWe don't have an ETA just yet, but Perl support is definitely on the way!
- aarondf 14y agoCan someone explain the concept or value of multiple instances on this? If an app is getting hit pretty hard can you just turn on another instance, albeit with less ram? Do you have to write your code in such a way to support it being run on multiple instances? Are there certain types of apps that are CPU intensive and RAM light, making the many instance/not much ram trade off a good idea?
- iowahansen 14y agoAfter migrating a Java application that ran on EC2 to AppFog over the weekend, I wouldn't recommend running mission-critical apps on their infrastructure yet. A few things that I ran into - After EC2 East was slow like molasses, I switched over to EC2 EU which was still speedy - That caused their CLI tool to fall on its nose when trying to tunnel to the database (right now the bridge always gets installed in EC2 East). Fixed with a simple patch in the Ruby source - Looks like the backend connector in nginx won't connect to your app if you have Basic-Auth on your root index - Later MySQL became unavailable with "Host '10.0.47.186' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts'". No connection limiter between different apps? I think AppFog is offering a great value should they be able to iron out all the kinks. I'm crossing my fingers that this will happen quickly.
- sdotsen 14y agoSo how do you handle SSL for custom domain names?