AppFog Paas, a cloud hosting platform launched into general availability & released their pricing. Since, the pricing looks attractive, I decided to try Appfog over the weekend by migrating this wordpress blog over there. So, if you want to know how Appfog is or just want to learn how to host your wordpress blog on appfog for FREE, read on!
What is AppFog?
AppFog is a Cloud Hosting platform which is categorized as Platform as a Service(PaaS). PaaS is the thing that lets developers stay developers but still empower them to deploy applications that can reach millions. Basically, PaaS saves you from having to do system administration & focus only on development of your web application. think of all the tasks you have to do when a new box is commissioned into production; they are silly things like installing web server,download & compile PHP/ruby, installing security update, firewall & security configuration & countless other small configurations & optimizations. With PaaS like Appfog, you get that application environment ready out-of-the-box & with lots of other features like scaling, cloning etc. Appfog supports multiple runtimes, PHP(v5.3),Ruby MRI(v1.9), Java(v7), Node.js(v0.4 & v0.6), Python(v2.7) & Erlang(R14).
Why should I care about AppFog?
Agreed, there are a lot of other PaaS solutions like Google App Engine, Redhat’s OpenShift, Salesforce’s Heroku, Microsoft’s Azure and many others but I am going to give 2 things that according to me are special about Appfog:
- Ability to Choose Underlying Cloud Platform & Locations: Appfog lets you pick almost any cloud(current supported are AWS, Rackspace, Azure & HP’s Openstack) with choice of location where your app would be hosted(current locations are in US,Europe & Asia). This is in sharp contract with PaaS solutions like heroku where you are forced to host in US even half of your traffic comes from other parts of the world resulting increased latency. With Appfog, you can seamlessly deploy your application to multiple clouds at different locations. Thereby reducing SPOF
- Generous Free Quota: Free plan gives you total 2 GB RAM(per account) which scalable over multiple instances, 1GB Database(per account), 50 GB data transfer limit(per account) & 100mb diskspace(per application). Except the 100mb diskspace, all others are pretty generous. There is a comparison of appfog with other PaaS solutions on what you have to pay for 4 instances with 512MB each:
Pass Provider Price/mo dotcloud $276 Heroku $107 AppFog $0
DreamHost is one of oldest shared webhosting services around. they are being in business since last 10years. they follow the concept of single plan hosting. there have only one plan under which they all the unlimited features.