Pagoda goes in private beta - Heroku for PHP | Hacker News Reader

Pagoda goes in private beta - Heroku for PHP

pagodabox.com

47 pointsranza33 comments

Their website is ridiculously well designed -- possibly on par with Heroku. Doesn't say much about their solutions and infrastructure, but it does signal great care.

Pulling only from github seems very restrictive to me. So, basically if I want to put a private project on PagodaBox, I have to also purchase a github account.

What's wrong with a github account? Give them some love. Their private option is cheap. Over all once you start using github it's hard to go any other route anyway.

Other people may use their own git server or a different git host.

Anyways, since git is decentralized, why go through github? What about pulling/pushing between the user (or any arbitrary git client) and pagoda box directly?

Edit: I watched the screencast, your deployment process is a bit different than I expected so I guess using github is probably a good idea.

Yeah good points. Anyway looks like here's a more straight forward reason: http://guides.pagodabox.com/getting-started/git-github "...the feature-set available in the Admin Panel and the Pagoda Terminal Client are directly tied to Github's API"

Nothing wrong with github, I spend WAY too much time there :-), but I prefer deploying my personal project from my home web server. It's just adding another layer where something could go wrong to my deployment process.

So now i need to add $$ to my monthly expenses even though i'm already paying for a VPS that i host my git projects on?

I also disagree that it's hard to go any other route. Gitweb works great (the interface is better than github's imho) and it's free for unlimited public and private projects provided you already have a place to host it (i'd best 99% of HN users do).

Assembla has been working great for us, and it's free. Currently we have 20+ repositories hosted there, both git and svn, all free. Not saying it's better than Github, but so far, we haven't felt a need to use github, since there's a good free solution that fits our needs.

So as much as I like everything else about Pagoda, if they're forcing us to go github route with no alternatives, I won't be checking it out.

What's wrong with a github account?

It doesn't support Mercurial. I use BitBucket, on which private repositories are free (and I don't have to use git, which is a plus).

Supporting only github means I can't use it. Unfortunate, because their stuff looks cool.

> Supporting only github means I can't use it. Unfortunate, because their stuff looks cool.

I'm sure if you really wanted to use Pagoda, you could use the http://hg-git.github.com/. Or you could just sign up for a free Github account (free seems to be a requirement for you, and these days with the state of the economy I can definitely relate. although no free and private as you mentioned) and learn git, which is a joy to use, and blazingly fast, which is nice for cloning large repos. Personally, I use Heroku and prefer Ruby to PHP so I don't feel compelled to try Pagoda, but I could appreciate the work that went into the site, and the backend. Impressive.

I am well familiar with git--I have been subjected to dealing with it on many unpleasant occasions. Git is as far from a joy to use as anything I can think of. A rather large number of scripts and other tools I've developed depend on hg out of convenience, and I have no interest in porting them to a tool that is not better for my use case where it is superior and considerably worse where it is inferior. As far as I'm concerned, git is a piece of software good in its niche--a niche that happens to be kernel development, not web-development-because-some-Ruby-people-thought-it-was-trendy--made popular via cargo-culting and it offers me nothing that Mercurial doesn't. Well, I should say that it offers nothing aside from needless complexity, substandard tools on Windows, and and poor user interface design. If Pagoda (or anyone else, for that matter) is going to perpetuate the cargo cult, I am going to decline to use it.

I can afford a Github subscription. It's not that much money. It's just completely worthless to me.

I use Unfuddle. For $9/month we get 4 active/4 inactive projects, 10 people, unlimited wikis, unlimited repositories, message, milestones and a ticketing system. Suits what we do to a T

The PHP Fog web designer could learn a few things from the Pagoda site. I found Pagoda much more informative and has better usability than Fog. The graphics and images on Pagoda aid the user in understanding how Pagoda works and why it's better than traditional hosting, instead of hitting you over the head with over-the-top beautiful graphics that ultimately don't say or mean much as on Fog. The typography also makes the copy easier to read. The video demo is very slick.

It's funny, I almost down-voted you thinking this was a sarcastic post since my first impression of Pagoda's homepage was "wtf?" - but, their site caught my attention and encouraged me to progress through the process to find out more.

I'm not sure whether the designers of Pogoda's site are flat out geniuses or skating on thin ice.

I like it how the screencast didn't use a terminal; not even once. This is very different from the other Heroku for x initiatives.

That, bundled with their absolutely gorgeous design is a huge differentiator from the alternatives.

I like the idea of Pagoda pulling from the github repository, but what happens if github is for any reason inaccessible and you need to make an update to your site? Is there a backup method?

From the video:

"Select which framework your using"

"your" should be "you're"

PHPCloud isn't built in PHP. Anyone know if Pagoda is built in PHP? I'm more partial to supporting a php PAAS that is intimately familiar (on a day to day operational basis) with my language.

Same group that runs this Magento (PHP) extension shop: http://www.tinybrick.com/

Also recalled a tweet awhile back, here it is: http://twitter.com/#!/PagodaBox/status/60133469107388416

sounds a lot like https://www.phpfog.com/

if we're naming competitors, here's another: http://cloudcontrol.com/

And here's a big list: http://blog.huchunhao.com/current-and-upcoming-cloud-platfor...

Thread complete.

Does anyone know who their hosting provider(s) are? I'm curious to know if they rolled their own infrastructure or if they are cloud based.

Also, does anyone know about their funding and the team?

On the surface it looks promising, but I'd like to hear more about the team behind the effort and further details on the back-end behind the black box.

Judging from WHOIS they seem use Softlayer.

Yay! More PHP PaaS services with a real cloud architecture. Very nice.

Please add PostgreSQL and I'll start using it!

This is gorgeous: http://www.pagodabox.com/architecture

Almost making me want to write PHP

Site alone makes me wanna give them a try :)

right? I was about to post some snarky comment about "php is the heroku for php" but then I went through their site and was actually impressed. It would be rad if they had a free tier which turned into a "paid" account if it hit a certain threshold.

They do have a free tier: http://www.pagodabox.com/pricing

hah I totally misunderstood that. Once you log into the dashboard it's really clear because you see the slider w/ $per 30 days. It would be cool to stick that on the pricing page directly.

From what I can see per 30 days: 1 clone($0.00) .. 25 clones($864.00)

Wow, this is seriously awesome. Gorgeous design and the admin panel is incredibly easy to use.

Request invite if you're interested, I got it pretty quickly. Great design indeed.

I have 10 invites...

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