It was originally written in Rails, but was rewritten in Laravel, a framework by Taylor Otwell who's a really smart guy (http://laravel.com).

I wanted to go with PHP because I'm thinking I might want to do an open source GNU/GPL version that ties directly into PressRise.com at some point in the future, and the general population seems more comfortable with PHP for that kind of thing.

Funny I was just looking at building a reddit clone in Laravel, did you use Redis?

I haven't implemented Redis for this project, but I know it well and that's something that would probably happen if it came time to scale things.

laravel 5.1 (LTS) requires PHP 5.5.9+ [1]. I don't think this version would be widely available on those "low-end budget share hosting" environments.

On the other hand, deploy a RoR project is relatively simple with Heroku's "heroku button" [2].

[1] http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/releases#laravel-5.1

[2] https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2014/8/7/heroku-button

Why is the timing good?

I'm not disagreeing with you - just curious if you're referring to news or some current event of which I'm unaware.

Google search for "reddit revolt":

https://news.google.com/news/story?ncl=d6P_JkYeOGjy8XMtXidQO...