
AppFog Pricing Released - paukiatwee
https://console.appfog.com/pricing
======
Danieru
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
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.

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

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

------
qw
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

~~~
ya3r
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.

~~~
qw
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.

~~~
Ecio78
In the main page Redis is cited, it looks like they are based on Vmware's
CloudFoundry, where I suppose Redis is a first class citizen

------
gary4gar
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!

~~~
lucperkins
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.

~~~
gary4gar
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 ;)

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

~~~
mechanical_fish
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.)

~~~
lucperkins
I think that that's a good description overall, although I would add that the
free plan allows deployment to all currently available IaaS and hence to do
things like run analytics on the different infras to see what works best. But
I would push back a little bit by saying that you can run apps getting some
pretty legit traffic for free. It needn't be just "Hello world" or sandbox
apps.

------
level09
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
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.

------
mun2mun
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.

------
iowahansen
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.

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

------
balakk
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
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.

------
tapsboy
Custom domains are free too.. I am pleasantly suprised

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

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

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

Anyone know about reliability?

~~~
shykes
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)

~~~
lucperkins
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).

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

Does that "etc" include Clojure and Scala?

~~~
human_error
"MySQL, Mongo, PostgreSQL, etc."

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

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

~~~
biot
Rather than saying "etc." which makes it look like there are additional
databases you currently support but are not listed, why not change it to "and
more on the way" which clearly communicates what you mean?

------
dekz
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.

~~~
lucperkins
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
Sinatra really isn't working.

~~~
lucperkins
We worked hard on Sinatra support this past weekend. Give it another shot.
I've deployed multiple test Sinatra apps painlessly today, which was
admittedly far less painless last week.

------
aarondf
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?

------
bbayer
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>

~~~
lucperkins
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.

~~~
bbayer
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.

------
esente
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.

~~~
lucperkins
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?"

~~~
esente
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.

~~~
lucperkins
Build packs and GitHub hooks are also on the roadmap

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

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

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

This looks like a potential moneymaker.

------
frankwiles
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
Let me help you out: <http://www.appfog.com/>

Clear as can be.

------
huragok
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?

------
m0shen
No Perl support. But, it looks like it's a Cloud Foundry thing:

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

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

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

~~~
Ecio78
Any plan for SSL? And Apache Solr as a Service?

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

------
sdotsen
So how do you handle SSL for custom domain names?

