Looking for something like amazon s3 but can handle php

if you need cloud, i use rackspace and gogrid, although i think gogrid has a new name, both can do PHP. I might have misundertood your need though so forgive me if wrong.

Personally I would stay away from Rackspace for cloud hosting. We had over 100 sites hosted on their CloudSites. One of the sites was attacked with a SQL injection & the malware spread to every other site we had hosted with them. I think they have security issues with their control panel for the CloudSites. I don't think would have happened if we were using their CloudServers(dedicated servers with the advantages of cloud hosting).

I like liquidweb's cloud hosting, Storm Cloud Servers - A Liquid Web Company

Ive been with rackspace for over a year and no problems though, if your blaming them for the spread of an attack with an insecure script you installed, then your doing it wrong.

there are about a million cloud hosts, if you want to stick with amazon they have 'ec2' which can handle php.

I use Rackspace Cloud, love it. Cheap, simple and reliable. Never had any problems, and great support btw.

Anyone ever had problems with rackspace cloudsites database? Namely connections timing out, dropping, or never connecting at all. I've had to move my database back to a dedicated server because of this and was wondering if anyone else had similar issues? Thinking I may be keeping mysql connections open too long.

Amazon has another service -- EC2. This service allows you to load as many virtual machine instances as you'd like, and they give you some great tools to do so. You can serve anything you'd like -- the servers are yours to configure.

heavyt,

There isn't going to be a turn-key solution for you. There isn't much similarity between distributing static content like html/javascript/images across multiple servers and application logic like PHP across multiple servers. Horizontal scaling is possible, but you need to figure out where the bottleneck in your application is on your own. For example, the solution might be sharding a MySQL server and accepting eventually DB consistency. But none of this is plug-and-play with the cloud.

The cloud has tons of great uses, but it can't automatically make your php application multithreaded. If you can figure out yourself how to get the application working on a distributed system, then the cloud is great for deployment.

Lithium. said:

I use Rackspace Cloud, love it. Cheap, simple and reliable. Never had any problems, and great support btw.

Click to expand...

I'm done with Rackspace. This thread has a few bad experiences with their Cloud Sites product, and their Cloud Servers product is just a VPS with no cloud-like features. I've had two 9+ hr downtimes with Cloud Servers due to their host-server hardware problems, including one with total data loss.

Total data loss on a cloud? Yes - because it's not a cloud. They're running servers with 8 drives running RAID 10 for storage. There's no SAN storage or anything. It's a plain VPS, and it's garbage for reliability.

I'm moving my sites to VPS.net - server image is hosted on a SAN, so there's more reliability there. However, I still run a clone of my sites & database (mirroring via MySQL) on a separate host by using DNSMadeEasy's failover service. If my primary server fails, DNS switches to the second and I don't lose any tracking, hosting, or redirect capabilities.

Dullspace said:

heavyt,

There isn't going to be a turn-key solution for you. .

Click to expand...

WRONG, SIR!
It is true that up until recently there weren't any options shy of running your own servers, and hoping to god they scale. I still play that game every day.

BUT BUT BUT, welcome to 2010, you should check out Heroku. It's for Ruby/Rails, but there's lots of others like it, Heroku simply being the best example. They call it Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and after having the pleasure to work with it, it's a new technology I'm geeked on. Basically, you upload your code, it gets hosted. On Heroku, we get this bitchin' little slider widget that we can crank up to beef up our site -- I love shit like that. You can think of S3 as being IaaS as well, but with only HTTP support.

PHP support is a whole nother thing. I've seen five or six starups offering similar services with PHP support -- Some specifically designed for PHP apps, some designed to be multi-tenet. Personally, I'm migrating three different personal projects to DotCloud as soon as they approve my beta invite, which they assure me I'm "at the top of the queue for". Dotcloud seems to be the most robust offering that supports what I want (django, redis, hbase), but they say they support PHP as well.

If you're looking to really get your next-level-shit on, I feel pretty confident that IaaS is the right way to do it.

uplinked said:

WRONG, SIR!
It is true that up until recently there weren't any options shy of running your own servers, and hoping to god they scale. I still play that game every day.

BUT BUT BUT, welcome to 2010, you should check out Heroku. It's for Ruby/Rails, but there's lots of others like it, Heroku simply being the best example. They call it Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and after having the pleasure to work with it, it's a new technology I'm geeked on. Basically, you upload your code, it gets hosted. On Heroku, we get this bitchin' little slider widget that we can crank up to beef up our site -- I love shit like that. You can think of S3 as being IaaS as well, but with only HTTP support.

PHP support is a whole nother thing. I've seen five or six starups offering similar services with PHP support -- Some specifically designed for PHP apps, some designed to be multi-tenet. Personally, I'm migrating three different personal projects to DotCloud as soon as they approve my beta invite, which they assure me I'm "at the top of the queue for". Dotcloud seems to be the most robust offering that supports what I want (django, redis, hbase), but they say they support PHP as well.

If you're looking to really get your next-level-shit on, I feel pretty confident that IaaS is the right way to do it.

Click to expand...

Okay, let's pretend that Ruby is the same as PHP. I switch my application over to Heroku and throw 100 cloud servers at it. Is the disk IO bottleneck on my MySQL database going to improve? No, it's going to be worse, because the commodity cloud servers are slower than my dedicated hardware. Is Heroku going to automatically shard my database and manage concurrency? Is it going to port to a distributed alternative like Cassandra? It's not.

Playing with those sliders might work for you, but assuming they are the solution for the majority of businesses in need of horizontal scaling is factually incorrect. The only solution is to start by analyzing the application. When the specific problems are identified, then the discussion of deploying on a cloud can begin.

uplinked said:

WRONG, SIR!
It is true that up until recently there weren't any options shy of running your own servers, and hoping to god they scale. I still play that game every day.

BUT BUT BUT, welcome to 2010, you should check out Heroku. It's for Ruby/Rails, but there's lots of others like it, Heroku simply being the best example. They call it Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and after having the pleasure to work with it, it's a new technology I'm geeked on. Basically, you upload your code, it gets hosted. On Heroku, we get this bitchin' little slider widget that we can crank up to beef up our site -- I love shit like that. You can think of S3 as being IaaS as well, but with only HTTP support.

PHP support is a whole nother thing. I've seen five or six starups offering similar services with PHP support -- Some specifically designed for PHP apps, some designed to be multi-tenet. Personally, I'm migrating three different personal projects to DotCloud as soon as they approve my beta invite, which they assure me I'm "at the top of the queue for". Dotcloud seems to be the most robust offering that supports what I want (django, redis, hbase), but they say they support PHP as well.

If you're looking to really get your next-level-shit on, I feel pretty confident that IaaS is the right way to do it.

Click to expand...

Wake up lee, its 2011 brah.. where you been?

uplinked said:

BUT BUT BUT, welcome to 2010, you should check out Heroku. It's for Ruby/Rails, but there's lots of others like it, Heroku simply being the best example. They call it Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and after having the pleasure to work with it, it's a new technology I'm geeked on. Basically, you upload your code, it gets hosted. On Heroku, we get this bitchin' little slider widget that we can crank up to beef up our site -- I love shit like that. You can think of S3 as being IaaS as well, but with only HTTP support.

Click to expand...

Yeah, Heroku surely sounds awesome after their huge security issue... daverecycles.com & Security Vulnerability

Dullspace said:

Okay, let's pretend that Ruby is the same as PHP. I switch my application over to Heroku and throw 100 cloud servers at it. Is the disk IO bottleneck on my MySQL database going to improve? No, it's going to be worse, because the commodity cloud servers are slower than my dedicated hardware. Is Heroku going to automatically shard my database and manage concurrency? Is it going to port to a distributed alternative like Cassandra? It's not.

Playing with those sliders might work for you, but assuming they are the solution for the majority of businesses in need of horizontal scaling is factually incorrect. The only solution is to start by analyzing the application. When the specific problems are identified, then the discussion of deploying on a cloud can begin.

Click to expand...

OK, you're right that everything needs to be specifically analyzed and there's no "right answer for everyone", but I disagree that the majority of businesses don't fall in the same boat. In most peoples cases, the scaling game is played roughly the same way -- (one server) -> (one larger server) -> (split mysql from web) -> (more web nodes) -> (larger sql server), until you can't take your mysql server any larger -- This is when we move into sharding and distributed solutions, but few apps make it this far. I've done this same dance for a few dozen apps in the last couple of years, and the first stages are always the same thing; it's always a persistent annoyance that drags me away from spending my time writing code.

I'm suggesting letting someone else manage all that fucking bullshit for you. I'm advocating paying extra for a database that *someone else* will scale for you, and letting them load balance the HTTP servers. I'm of the opinion that, while I think I can configure and tweak these services with the best of the experts, there's little financial incentive for me to do so. That's like the summary of everything that I love about using S3 for static files, and it's clear to me that I want to be able to scale my webapps with the same simplicity.


His OP is kind of vague, but HeavyT seems to want what I want -- a place to upload my code, so I can spend my time coding, that will host it and manage the same scaling procedure that I'd follow by hand, automatically.

eliquid said:

Wake up lee, its 2011 brah.. where you been?

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Holy shit, when did that happen? Are there flying cars yet? I was extremely upset to discover that the milk in my fridge labeled "Jan 10" was sour this morning.

johu said:

Yeah, Heroku surely sounds awesome after their huge security issue... daverecycles.com & Security Vulnerability

Click to expand...

Nice, you clearly looked past the part where I kept trying to drive my point home -- "Heroku is exemplary of IaaS but not the only provider". Security holes happen; you should trust someone that doesn't have a history of them. Or acknowledge that the risk of personally getting fucked by a security hole like this is pretty much a crapshoot, no matter who you use. I use Heroku for another app, and lo-and-behold, we were not compromised (according to Heroku, nobody was), so the amount that we pay to have our app scaled for us is still a bargain.