WP is not really a 12-factor app. so i guess it depends on your PaaS. in general bottom up, dev-to-dev, not top-down (sales, business relations …) works for us — i am co-founder of fortrabbit (PHP as a Service).
i think "GetPantheon" is doing a good job for professional WP hosting. wp-engine also. …
plug: i'm co-founder of PHP-only-PaaS fortrabbit — seeing Heroku move in our direction shows me that we are doing something right. We see a lot of momentum in the PHP community — some call it a PHP renaissance. Laravel, Composer and lately Facebooks input with HHVM (& Hack) are the cornerstones. Of course PHP is not everyones cup of tea, but something to be taken seriously.
shameless plug:
fortrabbit (i am founder) is dedicated "PHP as a Service". Our infrastructure provider is AWS Ireland, we have a lot of clients from the UK.
at least one alternative:
http://viaduct.io/ looks promising to me. seems to be from the UK, running on own hardware.
Nice - I'll take a look at fortrabbit. Your MYSQL Add-on pricing seems a little steep between 64mb and 512mb. Shame you do not have anything in the middle.
Shame that I have a wait to have a quick play. "Yeah! You will get a free slot in 5-7 days"
Viaduct looks promising but no pricing information.
SHAMELESS PLUG: we've build a PHP PaaS: http://fortrabbit.com which brings you a system that feels pretty much like your ususal LAMP stack but comes with a lot of candy on top.
The main benefit is: it's managed. You don't need to care about dependencies, updates, patches yourself. It's made for the needs of PHP web application development – continuous development, multi-staging etc.
We believe that the convenience we offer is more important than the few dollars (well actually Euro in our case as we are based in EU) you can save.
Curious what you think. Is it a fit? Are you missing something? Is it too expensive?
I think AWS convenience depends who you are. You can do great things with AWS, but it is indeed complex and you need to get into it first – maybe not something for the usual web dev guy. That's why there are "middleware" services like ours can be valuable: The power of AWS without the hassle at your fingertips.
My two cents here: Benchmarking is all fine, but from my point of view, the performance-price-ratio is not sooooo important in hosting.
This discussion here reminds me of PC customers buying behavior in the 90ies. What's better AMD or Intel? ... Nowadays other features are key: What's the weight of this device? How thick is it even? Apple has changed the way we look at these things today.
Convenience also matters in hosting a lot. How much time do i have to spend to have my app up and running? Do i really want to set up and maintain everything myself? How good is the support? Do i want just bare metal computing resources or a solution provider with an eco system?
What matters the fastest server ever, when the queries are slow? The performance of any app/website relies heavily on the engineering skills of the developers. See caching, see i/o load, see frontend technolgies, see #perfmatters.
Open source PaaS sounds good! The download button is a bit confusing to me – it directs me to a docs page, then i click on what is appscale, suddenly i am on youtube???
name: do you know goscale?
plug: i am one of the fortrabbit founders ;)
