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Heroku for PHP - Private Beta Signup

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Re: Heroku for PHP - Private Beta Signup

#31

Post by bphogan »

tlack wrote: post #11
cardmagic wrote: post #2

Hey fellow hackers, would love your feedback for making this a killer service.

Prefer 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.

With 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.

Re: Heroku for PHP - Private Beta Signup

#32

Post by ErrantX »

noodle wrote: post #22
mdasen wrote: post #18

I 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 l…

i disagree, somewhat. yes, this won't provide truly comparable services to heroku. clearly. the languages and stack don't work the same way. but i think the point of this is to communicate the fact that they're abstracting out the server and scalability details. i'd pay to not have to worry about all that stuff and just work on the app. if this thing will handle the server for me, keep it secure and up to date, provi…

I'm going to wait and see what they come up with.

But for decent scalable PHP hosting there are lots of options - sure you need to do a little configuration but, as an example, I just purchased another couple of "shares" on Gandi.net tonight.

Adding "share" as extra capacity for a server that needed it took a few seconds. Booting up a new instance on another "share", whipping nginx and my default configuration on took seconds (to set the script off, then it was a 10 minute wait).

So what, I guess, they have to do is put together a comparable service that removes the extra 10 minutes configuration work but adds benefit and doesn't cost any more.

(don't get me wrong - if they make it, I will use it :D)

Re: Heroku for PHP - Private Beta Signup

#34

Post by apinstein »

mdasen wrote: post #18

I 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 l…

Those are pretty absurd arguments. Have you ever deployed a scalable PHP app? While it might be somewhat easy to deploy a simplest-case PHP site, real sites are much more complicated.

* For good performance you need at least 2 boxes (Web Server and DB) * For scaling web to 2+ boxes, you need to deal with sessions meaningfully * For HA/Failover, you need to run a load balancer and infrastructure to keep hot-standby boxes running.

In fact, the only difference between a scaled PHP app and a scaled Rails app is the ruby interpreter. Everything else pretty much you need solutions for on both languages.

When Heroku first came out, I immediately asked when to expect PHP support. Since the answer was "don't expect it", I am glad to see someone else working on a solution.

Re: Heroku for PHP - Private Beta Signup

#36

Post by larrywright »

cmelbye wrote: post #4

like Heroku, but better Somehow I doubt that, but the service looks interesting. I wonder if there is a market for high quality PHP hosting.

It'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.

Re: Heroku for PHP - Private Beta Signup

#37

Post by gabriele »

cardmagic wrote: post #29
cfpg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, it's basically a PHP shared hosting with source control(git)? I would try it.

It will let you seamlessly grow from shared to dedicated hosting (and back again) as needed for either your application serving or database needs.

this is pretty much what Mediatemple.net already offers with Containers for their GS (shared hosting). They don't have PHP Containers but they do have MySql Containers that are automatically instantiated if traffic spikes. I think you could really make a difference by offering killer features on demand, like isolated memcached instances, redis, cassandra/mongoDB and RabbitMQ.

edit: email submited

Re: Heroku for PHP - Private Beta Signup

#38

Post by tlrobinson »

whalesalad wrote: post #17
qeorge wrote: post #7

Put 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 W…

The 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 bo…

It's actually really easy to setup a git deployment platform for PHP on pretty much any shared host that offers SSH access.

Here's one example solution that has been working well for me: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/279169/deploy-php-using-g...

Re: Heroku for PHP - Private Beta Signup

#39

Post by jdp »

mdasen wrote: post #18

I 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 l…

The "typically embedded" part is where something like this might be useful. PHP doesn't have to be embedded, the FCGI version of PHP runs as it's own daemon and responds to requests from the web server. In that case, management of the PHP daemons falls right under PHP Fog's responsibilities and that is where it adds value.
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