Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

http://orchestra.io/

by joelg87 • 15 years ago

61 28 15 years ago

orchestra.io

joeod• 15 years ago

great to see an Irish company in here

bcurdy• 15 years ago

And Great team! It's still early but my bet is that they're going to crush it...

davej• 15 years ago

Seconded, well done lads!

alanorourke• 15 years ago

Great job, looks great.

sbarre6• 15 years ago

At roughly $30/month minimum for the "basic" service (that doesn't auto-scale), plus costs for add-ons, you really have to not know what you're doing when it comes to deployment (or just have money to burn), because PHP/MySQL is just about the easiest thing to deploy in the world.

But having auto-scaling on your app, I could see this being worth the value if you want that kind of stuff to be managed for you.

EamonLeonard6• 15 years ago

Agreed, anyone can deploy PHP -- it's not rocket science. Scaling is what Orchestra is all about, but obviously you need to deploy before you can get to that point.

A note on pricing -- we're trying to find the right price point / service level offering, that the market will respond to. We've a "grandfathering" policy in place, which we've detailed at the bottom of our pricing page: https://orchestra.tenderapp.com/kb/about-orchestra/pricing-b...

sbarre6• 15 years ago

That's great to hear. I understand that you guys just launched and you're still figuring things out.

I was just trying to understand the initial value proposition for someone like me (who builds and deploys PHP sites for a living), when the initial cost is 3x what I am used to, and there are additional limitations.

I wasn't able to find it, but do you list application resources anywhere? How much memory do the various applications have access to, how much disk space do I get, etc?

At this point I would probably still roll my own cloud server for prototyping and initial deployment, and look into your scaling service if/when the need arises.

jqueryin2• 15 years ago

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 your application layer if you're trying to do some rapid prototyping for a minimal viable product that still has the balls to scale out if necessary.

sbarre6• 15 years ago

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.

noodle3• 15 years ago

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.

sbarre6• 15 years ago

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 can do compared to your own vanilla dedicated box) versus a dedicated cloud server that costs 1/3 of the price.

If they want to bring in customers initially onto their platform (which makes it way easier to upsell to the elastic service when the time comes), they might need to adjust their base pricing a bit to be competitive with similar (non-scaling) offerings.

I say this because unlike other application stacks like Rails, setting up a proper basic hosting stack in PHP is dead simple for a lot of people, so the bar is a lot lower than rolling you own for those other stacks.

justincormack• 15 years ago

I would like to see a security page. It is not clear if your app is isolated in its own microinstance or shared in some way that should be specified.

EamonLeonard6• 15 years ago

Thanks for the comment. Security important for everyone.

"Free" is multi-tenant. "Basic" and "Elastic" are isolated.

Some of the restrictions we have in place on "Free" are documented here. https://orchestra.tenderapp.com/kb/system-constraints/system...

I agree, a dedicated security page would be helpful, and is something we'll be creating soon.

Thanks again for your feedback!

jqueryin2• 15 years ago

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 =)

EamonLeonard6• 15 years ago

Thanks for the heads up! We'll get that fixed :)

davidcoallier• 15 years ago

Its' fixed :)

there• 15 years ago

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

EamonLeonard6• 15 years ago

Thanks for the heads up :)

itsnotvalid• 15 years ago

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 thing to notices on SAE, for non-Chinese readers, SAE has built-in function constraints. That means it's more like GAE in a way that not all the core functions and libraries are available[1] which is obviously security and performance reasons.

It would be interesting to see if any core functions be limited on orchestra.io as well.

[1]http://sae.sina.com.cn/?m=devcenter&catId=39#anchor_f2de...

EamonLeonard6• 15 years ago

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

pdenya• 15 years ago

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.

Loic• 15 years ago

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!

Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

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