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Re:Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service by jqueryin on Tuesday April 05, 2011 @08:24AM (#2410613)
While this is very true that there is a steep initial payment curve, many companies can afford to fit this minimal bill considering the cost of running their own dedicated machines. I think it's quite beneficial that there is OOB support for MongoDB, CouchDB, Amazon RDS, ZeroMQ, Gearman, Memcache & Memcached. Assuming some of these queues scale out automatically, there's a huge benefit in reducing the complexity of your application layer if you're trying to do some rapid prototyping for a minimal viable product that still has the balls to scale out if necessary.
Re:Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service by sbarre on Tuesday April 05, 2011 @08:40AM (#2410665)
Hosting costs are very minimal these days.

I can provision and configure a dedicated Ubuntu machine at Rackspace Cloud with all those services in about an hour (and I am far from being a sysadmin guru, I just follow the wiki instructions and best practices for security/firewall etc), and it costs me $12/month.

Re:Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service by claylo on Tuesday April 05, 2011 @09:31AM (#2410834)
This isn't about cost -- it's about scale and trust. When your app gets beyond what one instance will give you, and your customers demand more reliability than Rackspace Cloud is capable of today, you'll want some dudes in your corner who can help you.

Imagine a world where your application has enough traction that you're spending more of your time fixing issues or adding features to please/retain the maximum number of users.

Having been there, when that day comes, you won't be nickel-and-diming. You'll just want some rock-solid guys in your corner who allow you to worry about one less thing.

Re:Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service by sbarre on Tuesday April 05, 2011 @09:51AM (#2410897)
Yeah I think you missed my point. When starting out, at the point where I am not worried about scale, which means I would be looking at Orchestra's "basic" package (that doesn't scale), I am having a hard time understanding why I should pay 3x more than I would rolling my own server at Rackspace Cloud.

When my app needs to start scaling up a lot (and that's often an "if" not a "when" for a lot of projects), then for sure I agree that a well-managed service backed by talented people is worth every penny.

Re:Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service by EamonLeonard on Tuesday April 05, 2011 @09:59AM (#2410934)
Having done consulting for the best part of 10 years, we've taken that kind of route many times. It got to be a bit repetitive after a while, tbh.

I think if pushed on it, most developers would prefer to spend their time writing code than setting up and configuring servers. Which is why we created Orchestra.

Each to their own though :)