Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

At roughly $30/month minimum for the "basic" service (that doesn't auto-scale), plus costs for add-ons, you <i>really</i> 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.<p>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.

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.

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.

You guys may want to look at this as well: <a href="http://sae.sina.com.cn/" rel="nofollow">http://sae.sina.com.cn/</a><p>Sina App Engine - sort of like Google App Engine's take as a China clone, but it runs in PHP.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It would be interesting to see if any core functions be limited on orchestra.io as well.<p>[1]<a href="http://sae.sina.com.cn/?m=devcenter&#38;catId=39#anchor_f2de71d85ef96114aaf788c80297081c" rel="nofollow">http://sae.sina.com.cn/?m=devcenter&#38;catId=39#anchor_f2de...</a>

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.<p>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.<p>How do you differentiate? What is the real added value against Plesk whatever control panel is used at the moment?<p>Anyway, good luck and have fun!

great to see an Irish company in here

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.<p><a href="http://tinypic.com/r/30mwjrl/7" rel="nofollow">http://tinypic.com/r/30mwjrl/7</a><p>I'm running FF 4.0 on Fedora 13. Hope this helps =)

Great job, looks great.