Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service • Hacker News Board

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#21

Post by EamonLeonard » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 1:59 PM UTC

sbarre wrote: post #14

jqueryin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is very true that there is a steep initial payment curve, many companies can afford to fit this minimal bill considering the cost of running their own dedicated machines. I think it's quite beneficial that there is OOB support for MongoDB, CouchDB, Amazon RDS, ZeroMQ, Gearman, Memcache & Memcached. Assuming some of these queues scale out automatically, there's a huge benefit in reducing the complexity of y…

Hosting costs are very minimal these days. I can provision and configure a dedicated Ubuntu machine at Rackspace Cloud with all those services in about an hour (and I am far from being a sysadmin guru, I just follow the wiki instructions and best practices for security/firewall etc), and it costs me $12/month.

Having done consulting for the best part of 10 years, we've taken that kind of route many times. It got to be a bit repetitive after a while, tbh.

I think if pushed on it, most developers would prefer to spend their time writing code than setting up and configuring servers. Which is why we created Orchestra.

Each to their own though :)

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#22

Post by noodle » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 2:02 PM UTC

sbarre wrote: post #20

noodle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the cost is about the same as its competitors (phpfog, cloudcontrol). "basic" is for people who've outgrown shared hosting and maybe a small virtual server, not really for someone who has a pet project they need a little space for.

I've got production apps running on the base cloud servers at Rackspace (12$/month) and they run just fine with non-trivial traffic and users. Far from what I would call a pet project. But to each his own. Again, my whole argument is not about elastic or scaling apps (where I totally get the value), it's about their non-elastic intro package and the value you would get from it (no scaling and limitations on what you…

true, getting something nontrivial set up isn't tough, and thats why (i think) the pricing isn't as steep as something like engine yard. this isn't meant for the people who're more than willing to do it themselves.

but don't you think that paying the extra $18/mo might be worth paying if it means that your server "just works" and you don't have to deal with it? even a LAMP-ish stack has its headaches during setup and (especially) high growth.

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#23

Post by sbarre » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 2:20 PM UTC

noodle wrote: post #22

sbarre wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got production apps running on the base cloud servers at Rackspace (12$/month) and they run just fine with non-trivial traffic and users. Far from what I would call a pet project. But to each his own. Again, my whole argument is not about elastic or scaling apps (where I totally get the value), it's about their non-elastic intro package and the value you would get from it (no scaling and limitations on what you…

true, getting something nontrivial set up isn't tough, and thats why (i think) the pricing isn't as steep as something like engine yard. this isn't meant for the people who're more than willing to do it themselves. but don't you think that paying the extra $18/mo might be worth paying if it means that your server "just works" and you don't have to deal with it? even a LAMP-ish stack has its headaches during setup and…

The problem I have with "$18/month more" is that when you are running and hosting 10 or 20 sites (like our company does) that adds up fast and cuts into the margin.

And I don't have ssh access. And I can't install my own extensions. And if I want to run cron jobs, it costs more. And if I want to run MongoDB, it costs more. And if I want to use Memcached, it costs more.

So while I get the convenience, "doing it myself" is super simple for PHP stacks, and the costs of using their basic non-elastic add up fast when you are hosting lots of sites, and it actually gives me less, not more.

When you say it isn't meant for people who want to do it themselves, I would agree on the elastic plans (running an auto-scaling setup correctly is not easy), but their basic plan really doesn't offer anything compelling for what I consider to be a relatively high price.

The whole scaling argument is great and if that's a real concern for your project, then services like Orchestra.io are awesome, but I think a lot of people over-provision and plan for scaling prematurely, and pay the price for it unnecessarily.

My sites don't have millions of users, but some of them have up to 10k registered active users and with some smart caching and setup, run just fine on the aforementioned 12$/month servers.

Anyways, I think I've made my point here. I wish these guys the best and I'm happy to see people offering these kinds of services in the (admittedly un-sexy but still very popular) PHP space, and I will definitely follow their progress on the scaling offerings.

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#24

Post by noodle » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 2:31 PM UTC

sbarre wrote: post #23

noodle wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

true, getting something nontrivial set up isn't tough, and thats why (i think) the pricing isn't as steep as something like engine yard. this isn't meant for the people who're more than willing to do it themselves. but don't you think that paying the extra $18/mo might be worth paying if it means that your server "just works" and you don't have to deal with it? even a LAMP-ish stack has its headaches during setup and…

The problem I have with "$18/month more" is that when you are running and hosting 10 or 20 sites (like our company does) that adds up fast and cuts into the margin. And I don't have ssh access. And I can't install my own extensions. And if I want to run cron jobs, it costs more. And if I want to run MongoDB, it costs more. And if I want to use Memcached, it costs more. So while I get the convenience, "doing it myself…

1) not every addon at every place like this immediately costs more.

2) your setup is the more common one, using services like this are less common. i have my own cheap servers that host multiple pages, as well, and i'm not going to switch them over. but i also have some apps that i might, because they're a headache to manage. but i think we agree -- this isn't something you're interested in because its not really for people in your situation.

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#25

Post by EamonLeonard » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 2:36 PM UTC

itsnotvalid wrote: post #16

You guys may want to look at this as well: http://sae.sina.com.cn/ Sina App Engine - sort of like Google App Engine's take as a China clone, but it runs in PHP. This platform (Orchestra) takes another approach, liking managing the ec2 instances than like the app engines that even the instance thing is transparent from the developers. Guess there can be many debates on whether which ones are better approaches. Also th…

Thanks for the tip, we'll check it out :)

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#26

Post by pdenya » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 3:05 PM UTC

Why do all these companies think I want to see the charge per hour for hosting? Maybe per hour would be useful for some people in certain situations but at least list the per month charges too.

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#27

Post by there » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 3:25 PM UTC

jqueryin wrote: post #8

If echolibre happens to be reading this, I'm seeing a stylesheet issue on your activation form where the two input boxes for email address and password are extending beyond the login containment box. Screenshot below. http://tinypic.com/r/30mwjrl/7 I'm running FF 4.0 on Fedora 13. Hope this helps =)

and on a macbook air with the browser maximized, i can't read the quote and whatever else this cloud is hiding:

http://i.imgur.com/pRWyAl.jpg

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#28

Post by EamonLeonard » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 4:00 PM UTC

there wrote: post #27

jqueryin wrote: post #8

If echolibre happens to be reading this, I'm seeing a stylesheet issue on your activation form where the two input boxes for email address and password are extending beyond the login containment box. Screenshot below. http://tinypic.com/r/30mwjrl/7 I'm running FF 4.0 on Fedora 13. Hope this helps =)

and on a macbook air with the browser maximized, i can't read the quote and whatever else this cloud is hiding: http://i.imgur.com/pRWyAl.jpg

Thanks for the heads up :)

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#29

Post by Loic » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 5:38 PM UTC

You will need to be very good at explaining why you are better than the traditional hosted solutions. For example, for PHP stuff, my provider (OVH) is putting my website one a cluster with 1000 servers with unlimited traffic and an insane number of goodies for 2€ (yes two) per month. I can hook a managed MySQL instance (Solaris Zone) with up to 1GB of RAM for some € per month. So it starts at 2€ and up to 60€ for something which can really handle heavy load.

I would have to do it now. I would look at offering PHP hosting for a limited set of frameworks with a really good integration of the framework within the infrastructure to add really good value to the developers. Let say a fanatical support of ZF with ready to use Solr indexing, memcached etc.

How do you differentiate? What is the real added value against Plesk whatever control panel is used at the moment?

Anyway, good luck and have fun!