In this post to his site Djordje Kovacevic shares the results of his evaluation of hosting providers in the platform-as-a-service arena for hosting PHP applications: OpenShift, Heroku and Fortrabbit.

I want PHP 5.6+, so I did some basic testing of those services to pick cheep and good solution to host my blog. OpenShift because I use it and it's free for 3 small gears, it was pretty good solution few years ago. Heroku because I used it for Ruby on Rails projects and they support multiple languages (even multiple build packs for one project)! I used FortRabbit too, so I decided to test theirs new apps.

For his testing he used a simple Laravel (v5.2) application with a handful of routes - something simple just to test out the setup and deployment processes. There is a "tl;dr" of the results but he also gets a bit more in-depth on what each service has to offer and some of the pros and cons of each. He also includes the results of some basic performance testing on the instances, linking to the raw output if you'd like to run your own metrics against it.

In the most recent post to the SitePoint PHP blog Aleksander Koko has written up a summary of using Pagoda Box for PHP applications. Pagoda Box is a platform-as-a-service hosting provider that makes automated deployment and hosting much simpler.

In this article, we’ll take a look at Pagoda Box, another PaaS (Platform as a Service). If you have used other PaaS in previous projects, Pagoda Box is similar to Heroku. Pagoda Box is PHP only (for now) and has a well defined architecture to start developing with PHP. Everything in PB is a component. The database is a component, the webservers, workers, cron jobs and the caching. Having such an architecture doesn’t only give you ease in development but also a control over money usage. This post will be a quick overview of this platform. We will set up a framework and look at a list of pros and cons, comparing it to Heroku.

He starts with a quick overview of the service and the features it offers (including databases, caching and the already mentioned cron and worker handling). He then gets into the creation of a sample application (using Slim) and the full deployment process. He introduces the concept of the "boxfile" before getting into his "pro" and "con" list as compared to Heroku.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post today introducing you to an alternative for hosting your own PHP packages privately using the Gemfury service. Gemfury is a hosted (PaaS) tool that lets you host packages (and not just Composer/PHP ones) without the need to have them public on Packagist.

Composer works effectively and seamlessly in conjunction with Packagist, a comprehensive repository of public packages. However, sooner or later the time will come when you’ve written your own package which, for whatever reason, cannot be open-sourced and shared freely via Packagist. There are a few options for hosting these private packages [like adding them manually, Satis or Toran Proxy]. [...] Gemfury is a PaaS alternative. Aside from the peace-of-mind that comes from a hosted solution – albeit one which comes at a price – one huge advantage is that it supports not just PHP Composer packages, but Ruby Gems, Node.js npm, Python PyPi, APT, Yum and Nu-Get.

He spends the rest of the article walking you through the creation of an account (with the 14-day free trial) and how to create a new package that will be pushed to the service. He adds one dependency (Faker) and a bit of code for the push. He shows how to add the git remote for the Genfury service, tag a release and deploy the result out to the service. He updates this by showing how to take that same repository and making it private, requiring a "secret code" to be able to access. He ends the post with a quick mention of other methods to work with the Genfury service including their own command line tool, fury.

Lorna Mitchell has a new post today sharing some helpful hints to help you pick a good PHP hosting provider for your next application or website.

I've been thinking a lot about the state of hosting in PHP lately, mostly as a result of working with a few different clients on their setups (including one that bought brand new hosting a month ago and got a PHP 5.3.3 platform), and also being at DrupalCon and meeting a community who is about to make a big change to their minimum requirements. With that in mind, here are my thoughts and tips on choosing hosting.

She starts off with one of the bigger criteria she looks for in a host: the minimum PHP version available (some might have more than one, especially some PaaS). She suggests that even things like PHP 5.3 should be considered too old and should be passed over in favor of newer releases like 5.5 or even 5.6. She then talks about some of the benefits that come from using a newer platform and the current levels of adoption and performance by PHP version. Finally, she includes an unofficial list of hosts that have set themselves out as good, solid PHP-friendly providers, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a tutorial posted for the Heroku users out there showing you how to install custom PHP extensions on the service as a part of your deployment. Heroku is a platform-as-a-service hosting provider that allows for flexibility in the architecture of your systems and spin up/tear down to happen easily and on demand.

In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to install custom extensions on Heroku. Specifically, we’ll be installing Phalcon.

He walks you through creating an account on Heroku first and getting the Heroku toolbelt system installed for your operating system. He then starts in on the Phalcon (a C-based PHP framework) installation including all needed supporting packages/extensions. He uses the PHP buildpack and creates a shell script that is executed when the deployment happens. He includes the commands and configuration to handle the deployment and test the resulting installation.

On the NetTuts site today there's a new tutorial that wants to help you get WordPress installed on OpenShift, the platform-as-a-service offering from RedHat that includes full PHP support.

OpenShift is a very good platform for running a WordPress site. PagodaBox and AppFog fair for hosting PHP applications for free; however, PagodaBox is quite slow, and has a hard limit of 10MB of MySQL for free plan. AppFog no longer supports custom domain on their free plan. You can also run PHP on Heroku, but it's a bit on the slow, as well. OpenShift solves all of above problems: It's fast enough, offers a free custom domain, offers large disk space, and a significant amount of MySQL storage.

They start by introducing some of the features OpenShift offers and the basics of what it includes in the free plans. They then walk you through the full process to getting an account set up and creating the environment for the WordPress install:

• Sign Up for an Account
• Setup Your Publish Key
• Get Your WordPress Up (includes code changes if porting an existing installation)
• Use Your Own Domain
• Setup phpMyAdmin

They also offer some tips post-installation to help keep things up and running (monitored), enabling remote SSH access and using SFTP to connect to the application if there's a need.

In a recent post Phil Sturgeon talks about the recent news from Heroku about their integrated PHP support and some of his own experience in using the new service feature and migrate his blog over.

Heroku was - as far as I remember - the first (mainstream) PaaS on the market. It was Ruby-only but it was that symbol of modern web development at the time, with the whole "slinging code", "getting shit done", make a Git repo and start shipping bro, hack project/agile-til-it-works mindset. [...] Git push your code, its deployed, one-click installs and drag to scale. It sucked that it was always for Ruby, because as I was also doing a lot of work in PHP I obviously wished I could have the same for my other projects.

He walks through some of the "evolution" of the PaaS (platform as a service) market as it related to PHP environments. He talks about other services like PHPFog, Pagodabox and Fortrabbit. The Heroku added true PHP support and he made his move. He goes through the steps he followed to get his blog migrated over and the commands needed to make the push.

In a recent announcement Heroku, a popular platform as a service provider, announced that they now fully support native HHVM support to their platform offerings. In this new post to the SitePoint PHP blog Bruno Skvorc shares some of his own thoughts on the announcement.

In a move that surprised most but displeased none, Heroku, the Cloud Application Platform, has added native HHVM support to their cloud. PHP has long been a viable solution for high traffic production apps, and has had one of the best package managers for a while, not to mention the fact that it’s evolved significantly since the days of “simple hacks for small projects”. The PHP “development model” has been anything but “hackish” in the professional circles for a while now. The unfortunate ignorance of Adam Gross aside, this really is some big news.

Heroku apparently saw an opportunity to engage a whole new area with the integration of HHVM (and Hack) support on their PHP instance offerings. They even offer a method for switching between the normal PHP instances and an HHVM one to make the transition as easy as possible.

Hasin Hayder has posted a guide to getting a Symfony2 application up and running in an OpenShift instance. OpenShift is a cloud hosting service that makes deploying and scaling applications simpler.

Openshift is a fantastic Polyglot PaaS from Redhat, and you can do a lot of things with these containers. The good news is that with free accounts, OpenShift gives three gears for free, forever. Today, in this article I will show you how to install and run your Symfony applications in OpenShift.

He shows you how to set up a Zend Server (5.6) instance and grab the repository through a git checkout. The commands to create a new Symfony2 application (via Composer) are also included. With a small change to the .gitignore, the needed configuration files and directories will no longer be ignored and will be pushed. There's also a bit of information about setting up and using the provided database instance.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has written up an article for the Engine Yard blog walking you through the full process of getting a PHP site set up and working with their platform-as-a-service hosting.

I’ve been experimenting with a variety of cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings lately, and naturally was interested in seeing what Engine Yard brought to the table for PHP developers with its Engine Yard Cloud offering. Deployment of my application includes several non-trivial aspects, and I wanted to see how easy, or difficult, it was to accomplish each.

He lists some of his criteria (including deployment from a git repo, usage of Composer and cronjobs) and notes that the EY service matches all of his needs. The rest of the post goes into the details of the deployment, breaking it up into sections:

• Initial deployment: Git and Composer
• Private Configuration setup
• Deployment Tasks
• Cronjobs
• DNS