Heroku for PHP - Private Beta Signup

PHP is a bit different. The language is typically embedded in the server and then the individual files are parsed and run. There's little configuration other than uploading the files since the server can just interpret the files ending in ".php".

Heroku needs to be able to put your application code on multiple servers and know which servers are responsible for your application. When one of your Thins isn't working, they need to kill it and spawn a new one, potentially on a new server and make sure they update their routing table. It's a tad complicated.

PHP Fog doesn't have to do much. Heroku is running around 65,000 applications. Assuming that applications are under 30MB (for the hard drive), a RAID-1 with 2TB drives on every server they have would do the trick with a simple load balancer sending requests to a random server would do the trick. Your code is resident on their 15 app servers, a request comes in and gets routed to a random one, it parses your PHP and returns a response. The application isn't in memory as a long-running process like it is with Rails. Heroku already just has shared or dedicated database servers. There's no fancy process monitoring that you need since you only have to ensure that Apache is still going strong.

But that's also why PHP Fog won't do as well. They aren't taking on as difficult a challenge as Heroku. They don't need to run something like god or monit to monitor lots of user processes. They don't need to pre-spawn application servers. They don't need fancy routing to keep track of what domain is being requested, what application belongs to that domain, and on what server that application is located. Because PHP doesn't usually involve long-running processes, it's taken care of for them. In fact, there are services like this already such as Rackspace's Cloud Sites (which puts your PHP or ASP code on multiple boxes, has a shared database, and loadbalances it). The same situation exists with Media Temple's Grid Service. Media Temple says, "hundreds of servers for the price of one". That's possible because the application code takes up such little space and can be easily replicated since it doesn't store state. Rails and Django users on Media Temple have to buy a "container" which comes with a certain amount of RAM on a specific box - because they need to keep the application in memory.

Rails deployment will get a lot more people on board because it's more difficult to do. You have to manage application processes. PHP deployment is already seen as something that "just works". And if someone is going to argue that this "just works" a little better, wait until different users are expecting different php.ini stuff - or they expect to be able to save to the local filesystem because that's what the code they downloaded does or do a highly insecure cross-domain require or all of the various things that can't "just work".

They could still be a very good webhost, but they aren't solving the same problem as Heroku and others (including Media Temple and Rackspace) have already gone the multi-server, auto-load-balanced and managed failover route for PHP (just not using git).

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

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 WiredTree already, but I'm always looking for new opportunities.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/279169/deploy-php-using-g...

I've been using this on my personal site and it works great.

I briefly considered making this, and the Python equivalent. Warning: I have worked extensively with PHP internals, and you are going to have a very bad time making this safe and secure.

I would suggest you add an option to use HipHop, the Facebook compiler, as an option. That would be a great selling point.

PHP is a free for all. Different frameworks do things differently and need to be scaled differently. Lots of people don't use frameworks. I think it will be hard to write a "one size fits all" infrastructure solution for PHP, like what Heroku did for Rails.

Even plugins come in php itself and aren't seperately pkged. There's no gems, no seperate server to serve the ruby backend. Just upload/push your code and it'll run. And any cheap host would do it. The _only_ advantage I see here is that I can increase my resources for the app (if it's like heroku) just with the click of a button without restarting the server.

But I can't wait to be proved wrong. All the best guys :)