Phusion Passenger Enterprise released | Hacker News Reader

Phusion Passenger Enterprise released

blog.phusion.nl

52 pointsninh39 comments

Or go directly to https://www.phusionpassenger.com ! Excited to hear what you guys think about it.

That deluxe version looks really out of place, almost as if it were thrown in there to make the pro version look good without thinking of the people that would be interested in something above pro.

When I put in my third server, do I have to buy the deluxe version (which takes my annual costs from $200 to $5000)? Or do I buy up to 25 of the pro licences to get up to 50 servers?

You may also want to consider making your commercial support offerings mesh with the enterprise licensing. As an example I seem to have to negotiate phone support and at best a 6 hour response time with the enterprise licencing or get an EUR 15K support contract to get 2 hours.

edit We've changed it to "custom" pricing for now, and will work on an updated pricing table to better reflect our intention of having an SLA included among other things. Thanks again! :)

Re: the deluxe version. Hmm, that wasn't our intention, we merely wanted to include a plan that had the entry level SLA pricing attached to it for support with guaranteed response-times. Apologies if it wasn't clear enough, but we'll be sure to fix this in a future site update.

Re: third server, if you're a startup, you'd end up buying 2 startup licenses. If you're not a startup, that'd be 2 pro licenses (or as you mentioned, buy 25 pro licenses to get up to 50 servers). Hope that clears things up a bit, it definitely is good to get constructive feedback like this so we can try and fix it. Much thanks! :)

You can purchase as many Pro licenses as you wish, each license granting the use of Phusion Passenger Enterprise on 2 distinct servers. If your total license fee rises above $5000, feel free to contact us for a more tailored license.

The commercial support offering is available primarily for demanding enterprises who require high support levels for software to be incorporated into their stack. The level of support from these licenses is beyond what is expected for normal product support, including consultancy time with our deployment experts.

As feedback I wish I could say to them this: "Everything looked great until I saw yourselves calling each other Ninjas. Chief Executive Ninja!? Bye."

At this point I might just be a bit jaded but the term ninja is about as flattering to me as peewee. It's not that I haven't worked with "ninjas" before and from that experience I've grown a very clear aversion to "ninja" anything. Add to that recruiters have picked up on the term and now everyone has to be a "ninja" to get the job. Really? Ugh.

Get rid of "ninja." Then I'll actually be able to point my boss to your website.

Re: 'Get rid of "ninja"' Done. Please consider pointing your boss to our website ;-) Thanks for the feedback, phusion.nl definitely needs a facelift and we're working on that, too :)

In the "Nedap story": "With activities branching into healthcare as well, it is important for their systems to be available at all times."

I think you can afford to lose the "as well".

Agreed, updated and should be visible in the next rolled restart ;-) Thanks!

The first line of this post mentions:

"Phusion Passenger is an Apache and Nginx module for deploying Ruby and Python web applications."

... yet I can't see any further mention of Python support in any of the linked roadmap posts, or on https://www.phusionpassenger.com/enterprise - does anyone have any more information about Python support?

Python support is in beta. We've actually already supported Python since 1.0, and it pretty much worked, but it remained an experiment and felt a little unpolished. Today, we've officially elevated it to "beta" status, meaning that it isn't terribly well documented yet, and may not feel as polished as Ruby support, but generally works well. We will publish blog articles and documentation about Python support in the near future. If you would like to stay up to date, please subscribe to our newsletter at http://eepurl.com/nXXrL

In a nutshell, you put your WSGI application code in passenger_wsgi.py. Point the virtual host's document root to the 'public' directory, and it just works. Very similar to Rack/Rails support, with passenger_wsgi.py substituting config.ru. See this for an example of Django on Phusion Passenger: https://github.com/kwe/passenger-django-wsgi-example/

When I looked at this around a year ago, there was surprisingly little code involved with supporting Python/WSGI. I was interested in adding support for Perl/PSGI; I decided that would take me longer than I had free time to commit, but for someone with more knowledge it might be a quick project and a real boon for running Perl web applications on shared hosting.

We've supported Python for quite a long time, we made a bit more public here: http://blog.phusion.nl/2012/04/13/a-sneak-preview-of-phusion...

Basically you can just drop in a WSGI python app, and we will serve it up :)

You might consider bundling the enterprise version with union station. A startup version with a 2 server license and union station monitoring for both would be nice. You could also offer access to the union station beta for anyone who buys enterprise now.

Why doesn't my old license transfer? /sarcasm

http://www.modrails.com/enterprise.html

Should probably remove this page since they share the same name and all.

In the past we had a donation campaign where users can donate arbitrary amounts of money to us. We called it an "enterprise license" as a joke - the "enterprise license" just gave you a fancy logo with the word "enterprise" in it.

Phusion Passenger Enterprise is no longer a joke. It is now a real product with real features. A while ago we started "de-joking" the old donation page. As you can see at, the page now explicitly mentions that it's a donation. The 'enterprise.html' URL is kept to prevent links from breaking, but we may change that as well in the future to reduce confusion.

That said, we're grateful to all the people who have donated and supported us. Our Startup license type is our way to support other startups.

Unfortunately, I cannot even get to the page - after a long wait, I get nothing. :( Guess I'll check back later today.

Doh, looks we're getting much more traffic than we expected. Working on it.

EDIT: fixed now, server ran out of memory and swap.

(I'm a first batch donor) in my understanding, we donated to support the development, but never bought a license (unless I'm mistaken?)

Yep, it was a license purchase, sorta (I was in batch 2). From their website at the time: "you’ll be able to purchase the limited version of Phusion Passenger Enterprise Edition for the price that you think that it’s worth. Get it while supplies last." Followed by a big green button saying "BUY ENTERPRISE LICENSE TODAY".

BUT, right below that it said: Actually this is really a donation. The "enterprise" name is just a joke.

Wayback Machine Link: http://web.archive.org/web/20081210192914/http://www.modrail...

edit: removed some asterisks that were causing a display issue.

If you think blog posts are boring you can skip to our awesome launch page here: https://phusionpassenger.com

We're excited to hear what you think about it.

I really wish I had something more constructive to say, but I just want to tell you guys that I really appreciate the product you've developed and the philosophy behind it.

I've tried a lot of other app servers, and while there are a lot of great products out there, I didn't find any of them to match the ease of installation, configuration, and stability that Passenger provides.

I'm looking forward to being a paying customer. Congrats!

In general very nicely done, but the $4999 option with every detail negotiable seems a bit amateurish. "Lets throw a number and see what sticks"

Having said that, the intention is, I imagine, noble. You want to be, and be seen, to be flexible and willing to work with your customer. But I think the way its presented will come across as wishy-washy.

I like the design, thought it may be a little busy at times. But certainly eye catching.

The Deluxe option is there to indicate that we have special offerings for large volume customers. If your yearly license fee would surpass the $4999 mark, feel free to contact us and negotiate a different set of license terms.

edit We've changed it to "custom" pricing for now, and will work on an updated pricing table to better reflect our intention of having an SLA included. Thanks again!

Apologies for the "amateurish" impression, it was actually meant to be a plan that would include the entry level SLA with guaranteed response times. After reading some of the feedback here, it's definitely something we're aiming to fix in the next update. Thank you for your feedback! :)

In my humble opinion, the design work is incredible. Not at all busy—clean, professional looking and well made.

Deleted comment

Yes it's running on Phusion Passenger Enterprise, we eat our dogfood. We were getting so much traffic that the server ran out of memory and swap. I tweaked some settings and it's ok now.

Awesome, I just bought a license. One question, one license is limited to two machines simultanuously... Is the usage in development (on a localhost) also counted against this limit?

Yes. We have however already received requests for workstation licensing terms. We will discuss this internally and see whether there's a better way to accomodate people who use Phusion Passenger Enterprise in development.

Wait, so the machine count isn't through the honor system? You truly won't be able to run another instance of the server if you have one production and one development server going?

We protect through our license, not through engineering. There is no copy protection implemented in Phusion Passenger Enterprise, so technically speaking, we can't stop you. Instead, we trust that our users won't abuse this fact.

How is this going to interact with the open source version, going forward?

We will continue to develop the open source version. All changes in the open source version will end up in Enterprise, but Enterprise will have more features. We intend on making a living out of this so by buying Enterprise you will directly sponsor development of the open source version.

Maybe you could create some kind of comparission table? Because it take some time now to understand what for I'm supposed to be paying for (and as long as passenger runs on few of my servers, it would be my pleasure to thank you for passenger by buying a license).

Aaah, we initially considered stacking the open source version against the enterprise version in a comparison table, but due to some previously made design choices, were unable to fit the column properly in time! Instead, we opted to drop that column in favor of being able to launch today and potentially fix in a future update.

Considering the feedback from this thread, it definitely looks like something we need to fit back in and will be among the things we'll work on for the next iteration/deploy. Thanks for the feedback and kind words, it's much appreciated seeing as we've been working on this for a while now; it easily becomes hard to look at things with a fresh pair of eyes after a while, which is definitely needed for giving a good first impression imo.

Hongli, Ninh, I've always loved Passenger (it's running almost all of my Rails apps) and am happy to see you guys try to get paid directly for all the effort that went into Passenger.

I just wanted to add my voice that I think it'll be useful for developers to know what you guys intend to do with the open source version now that you've the Enterprise version. A comparison table like mlitwiniuk mentioned would be useful.

Would also like to know when the open source version of Passenger 4.0 will be available so I can decide whether to pay for a few Enterprise licenses now or hold on.

Hey chuyeow, nice to see you like Passenger.

The Open Source version of Passenger will always be our core product, and it will be maintained and developed just as it always has been.

Phusion Passenger Enterprise is a set of features added on top of the Open Source version, to add stability and deployment features to high performance applications. As Ninh posted earlier, we are working on a direct comparison table to make the differences more clear.

Because Passenger Enterprise is built directly on top of Passenger Open Source, both versions are always released in tandem. This means that Open Source 4.0 and Enterprise 4.0 will be released at the same time.

+1 for ETA. Also - there is one thing more, that is unclear - I know, that you will not limit functionality of OS Passenger and it's still fully legit to use current version, but it would be great, if you could exclusively mark it somewhere, that this wouldn't be unclear. Or just create some kind of FAQ. You know - after all MANY people are using your software and once you've decided to start offering paid version, there are doubts about future etc

Hey mlitwiniuk, those are some very good suggestions. For version 2 of the site, we will make sure to include a FAQ.

For now we just want to make clear that Passenger Open Source will remain a fully legit product, and it will never be limited in functionality to increase sales on our paid products.

Hi Chuyeow, glad you like it. The open source version of Phusion Passenger 4 is already available, and has been for a while now. It hasn't reached beta status yet, but you can find the code in the 'experimental' branch on Github. Phusion Passenger 4 contains many rewritten subsystems, allowing it to perform better. It also supports multiple Ruby versions.

There's no need to hold on to buying Enterprise. All Phusion Passenger 4.0 open source features will become immediately available to Enterprise users. We also have some more Enterprise-only features planned for the future, and we will be announcing them on our blog.

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