
Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service - joelg87
http://orchestra.io/
======
sbarre
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.

~~~
EamonLeonard
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...](https://orchestra.tenderapp.com/kb/about-
orchestra/pricing-billing)

~~~
sbarre
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.

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pdenya
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.

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justincormack
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.

~~~
EamonLeonard
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...](https://orchestra.tenderapp.com/kb/system-
constraints/system-constraints#free-apps-restrictions)

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

Thanks again for your feedback!

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itsnotvalid
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...](http://sae.sina.com.cn/?m=devcenter&catId=39#anchor_f2de71d85ef96114aaf788c80297081c)

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

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Loic
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!

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joeod
great to see an Irish company in here

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

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jqueryin
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 =)

~~~
there
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>

~~~
EamonLeonard
Thanks for the heads up :)

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alanorourke
Great job, looks great.

