AppFog Pricing Released

https://console.appfog.com/pricing

by paukiatwee • 14 years ago

90 75 14 years ago

console.appfog.com

Danieru• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

Because 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.

lucperkins17• 14 years ago

There'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• 14 years ago

I think the answers are here: http://blog.appfog.com/if-paas-is-expensive-and-slow-why-not...

arunoda2• 14 years ago

This is the one of the cheapest PAAS I've ever seen. How about the performance?

fishcakes• 14 years ago

What about reliability. A multi-az paas would dominate heroku at any price.

Anyone know about reliability?

shykes• 14 years ago

dotCloud (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)

lucperkins17• 14 years ago

AppFog 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• 14 years ago

Interesting, 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• 14 years ago

Without the extremely aggressive throttling of a Micro instance, too; which means that one greedy app can bring everyone to a crawl.

mechanical_fish• 14 years ago

We 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.)

wmf• 14 years ago

I think that can be solved with cgroups.

tapsboy• 14 years ago

Custom domains are free too.. I am pleasantly suprised

arunoda2• 14 years ago

giving away a lot. Not bad. a good move to get some attention.

lucperkins17• 14 years ago

You could say that. But it should be noted that what is currently free will always be free.

balakk• 14 years ago

Interestingly, 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• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

"Java, .Net, Ruby, Node, Python, PHP, etc."

Does that "etc" include Clojure and Scala?

rmason• 14 years ago

How about Railo or OpenBD? Please.

human_error• 14 years ago

"MySQL, Mongo, PostgreSQL, etc."

I'd like to know what that "etc." stands for.

lucperkins17• 14 years ago

The "etc." simply means that we're looking to expand the number of database options over time beyond this list

Poiesis2• 14 years ago

PostgreSQL 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• 14 years ago

Since Clojure and Scala both compile to Java bytecode, I would assume so.

rabbitfang2• 14 years ago

I would hope so. Perhaps they should call those out to make it clearer?

edwinnathaniel3• 14 years ago

No Documentation on how to use Java.

Googling for AppFog Java gave back broken 404 links to github.

lucperkins17• 14 years ago

Java documentation is on the way soon

jameswyse• 14 years ago

Am I reading this right? I can start 16 instances of my app (with 128MB RAM each)? For Free?

Scotchy• 14 years ago

Yes that is right, altough if you really need 16 instances then I would assume you would hit the 50GB quite easily.

wildtype• 14 years ago

Yay. lets begin the exodus (from other service provider free plan)!

Smerity• 14 years ago

This 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• 14 years ago

It would be game changer, since it provide other regions like Singapore, which is very welcome for huge potential Asia customers.

lucperkins17• 14 years ago

Yes. There are also plans to expand to Amazon-Tokyo and Rackspace-Hong Kong

rabbitfang2• 14 years ago

I recently read that Heroku was considering going multi-region.

lucperkins17• 14 years ago

They 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• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

When 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.

lucperkins17• 14 years ago

Try 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• 14 years ago

Sinatra really isn't working.

bbayer3• 14 years ago

Same response with the Rackspace + Python setup. App is showed up in dashboard but I couldn't start it. Created domain returns a 404 page.

gary4gar2• 14 years ago

Doesn'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/wocw7.png

I would wish them luck!

lucperkins17• 14 years ago

True, 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.

gary4gar2• 14 years ago

Tried 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 ;)

grk• 14 years ago

50 GB data transfer limit ($0.15/GB for additional resources)

This looks like a potential moneymaker.

level09• 14 years ago

Free 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• 14 years ago

The sister concern: phpfog charges [5$ a month for custom domains](http://appfog.com/products/phpfog/pricing/) on the same tier. I would guess they'll have to eventually pull a switch on that.

qw2• 14 years ago

After 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• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

This 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.

qw2• 14 years ago

You'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.

frankwiles• 14 years ago

No 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• 14 years ago

Let me help you out: http://www.appfog.com/

Clear as can be.

huragok• 14 years ago

Been 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?

esente2• 14 years ago

No 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.

lucperkins17• 14 years ago

The AppFog command line tool is very straightforward and even somewhat Git-like: 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?"

esente2• 14 years ago

Regarding 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.

bbayer3• 14 years ago

I 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

lucperkins17• 14 years ago

Hetzner 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.

bbayer3• 14 years ago

Agreed. 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.

Poiesis2• 14 years ago

Does not seem to support SSL, which might be a bit of a dealbreaker for many.

Ecio782• 14 years ago

Any plan for SSL? And Apache Solr as a Service?

m0shen• 14 years ago

No Perl support. But, it looks like it's a Cloud Foundry thing:

http://cloudfoundry.org/search?q=perl

lucperkins17• 14 years ago

We don't have an ETA just yet, but Perl support is definitely on the way!

aarondf• 14 years ago

Can 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• 14 years ago

After 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• 14 years ago

So how do you handle SSL for custom domain names?

AppFog Pricing Released

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