Thread

Anyone tried aptana cloud hosting?
http://www.aptana.com/cloud

I haven’t.  I just checked it out and it is a cool idea, but I don’t think it is practical.  Essentially, you are getting a shared server with a deployment workflow and some extra goodies.  It is not really cheap, and as far as what it is, you can’t really compare it to real cloud hosting like EC2 because you aren’t deploying servers, you are deploying files onto the pre-configured Aptana servers.  In addition, I watched the short video demo and was shocked by what I saw.  In the video, they deploy a very light site and instantly it is swapping.  Furthermore, as the demo goes on, the swap continues to rise.  We are talking about a small site with NO traffic.  Fail.

I Been Looking into cloud hosting and the best I have seen so far are EC2, Flexiscale, and Mosso.

Cloud hosting is meaningless unless you are a salesman. 

Last I checked, Aptana cloud is paired up with Joyent.  That means you would get a Joyent Accelerator on the same sort of model that EC2 runs on.  The problem there (if this is still the case) is that you have to deal with Solaris.  I believe that Solaris is the best *nix server OS available but I hate the state of the userland.  That is, you have to spend time learning the quirks of Solaris.  For me, Linux is good enough.  Also, I haven’t been very impressed with Joyent and I have since moved on to other providers.  I have an lifetime Accelerator with them and I don’t even use it anymore.

So if they are comparing the service to EC2 then you might consider EC2.  The problem with EC2 is that the service is very expensive.  You can start up a server for a few hours for next to nothing, but if you want to run a critical production site on the service then you need to be ready to dish out the bucks.  The costs come from traffic charges (adds up fast) and the redundancy that you really should have built in for a serious application.  Your instance can just disappear and unless you have a well scripted recovery plan, you might want to run multiple instances.  In any scenario, it’s just expensive.

If you want a good “like EC2” setup from a solid provider at decent prices, go with Slicehost.  They have a similar plan where you can run a slice for a day and only get charged for that day plus one more day.  So a slice running 15 days would get charged for 16 days.  They also charge you the full price of a month and add the remaining to a credit.  So if you were to then start another slice, they would deduct that from your credit.  It’s not totally like the EC2 pricing model yet, but they are getting there.

Thurting, not sure where you got your information about Aptana cloud from.  Please post a link.  I don’t know they are paired with Joyent right now, but they were when the service was first unveiled.

I got my info from the official website.  Link in OP.  I believe it is fully managed, so the consumer won’t have to touch Solaris.

I got my info from the official website.  Link in OP.  I believe it is fully managed, so the consumer won’t have to touch Solaris.

Okay, thanks.  I guess I assumed too much.  It looks like they are still paired with Joyent but after that… I don’t really get what they are trying to do. 

I could read all the docs, but as a developer if they can’t give me a 2 minute explanation of how this thing works then I’m gone.

One the one hand, I’m highly skeptical of a dev environment where I don’t get root access.  On the other hand, Google App Engine ahd Heroku (Ruby on Rails “cloud” hosting which actually runs on EC2) are very interesting.

The Aptana service just looks too constrictive to me.  I would rather just use my own tools and get a VPS.  It looks like they are trying to create an entire work flow for the developer.

Also mentioned in this thread is Mosso.  There are a couple of Mosso offerings.  One is the “site” offering which appears to be to be a lot like the MT grid service (with equally bad reviews from what I have seen) and the upcoming “server” offering which is going to be Slicehost.