Ask HN: Heroku/GAE like service for PHP?

[dholowiski]

Can anyone point me to a Heroko/Google App Engine like service for PHP? I'm happy with Linode, but it would be nice if I could test out new ideas for free.

Hosting on a home-based server is not possible as my ISP scans for and blocks HTTP servers, on any port :(

[briandoll]

Check out PHP Fog: http://phpfog.com/ They offer something similar to Heroku, but for PHP.

[dholowiski → briandoll]

That seems to be exactly what I am looking for. It worries me though, that there is no pricing information. It makes me think this is just someone else's pet project.

[jordanlev → dholowiski]

I met this guy recently (Lucas Carlson) -- he's an accomplished ruby programmer who has written many gems and some books too (see http://rufy.com/). It's definitely not a pet project, although who knows how successful or long-running the business will be. Probably no pricing yet because it's still in beta.

[cardmagic → dholowiski]

Hi, I am the founder and it is definitely not just my pet project. My team and I are working very hard and fast to bring people on as quickly as possible and provide more public details. Follow us on twitter (@phpfog) for the latest.

[aonic]

I had the ISP problem as well, are you sure they scan all ports? They might just be scanning common HTTP ports such as 80, 88, 8080, 8888, etc.

I would pick some random port to host a web server and setup a load balancer on linode using nginx or pound and point it to your home server, that way your visitors don't have to see funky ports in their URL

Home Server (IP: 1.1.1.1)

    Web server running on port 25399

Linode Server (IP: 2.2.2.2)

    Nginx running on port 80
    `-> HTTP requests for host x.com
       `-> use 1.1.1.1:25399 as backend

x.com

     DNS A record points to 2.2.2.2

[nl → aonic]

Umm..

If you are going to the trouble of setting up a linode node for ngninx you may as well just run PHP from it too.

[JonnieCache]

>Hosting on a home-based server is not possible as my ISP scans for and blocks HTTP servers, on any port

Really? Exactly how often does your ISP perform this banner-scrape of all 65535 ports for every customer? Last time I checked that could take hours for each person. And have you considered fuzzing the shit out of their protocol parser?