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.

Rafael Dohms has a new post sharing the results of one of his recent struggles - getting a Symfony2 application deployed to the PagodaBox service using Composer to manage the packages. In the post he details each step of the process.

I have been working on a little pet project and wanted to put it up somewhere to show to a few people how it was going. I wanted something really simple so I decided to give the PHP PaaS solutions a try. Its a very simple Symfony 2.1 based app using Composer for vendor management, so I went on a quest to see what could be done and how.

He shares the contents of his Boxfile (a special file PagodaBox uses to configure your application) with entries for writeable directories, extensions to load and the database configuration. He found that, during deployment, everything is writeable by the "build" user, so there's no worries about installing Composer dependencies.

On the "A Cloudy Place" blog there's a recent post comparing two of the more popular platform-as-a-service PHP offerings out there - PHPFog and PagodaBox.

Platform services like Heroku and AppEngine have been well-known for the last few years and many companies have been using them successfully in their business. They are more attractive to startups, due to low initial cost and smaller headaches involved in setup. 2011 was a great year for platform services, with the emergence of many platform services and a new trend for supporting multiple languages instead of supporting a single language. [...] Here, I will go through two of the PHP platform services I have experimented with: PHPFog and Pagoda Box.

He talks about each of the options and looks at several key elements of each including the deployment process, scalability, monitoring tools, offerings for caching and the database management utilities bundled with the application. Both services offer a "free instance" for you to try out their services, so give them both a try and see what you think.

In this new tutorial on NetTuts.com Phil Sturgeon looks at how to "elevate your PHP" to a cloud-based hosting service, specifically Pagoda Box.

This article will walk you through cloud hosting for your PHP application with Pagoda Box. It’ll detail how to handle PHP dependencies, get your MySQL databases up and running (and debug locally), and customise various aspects of PHP with ease.

He walks you through the entire process you'll need to fire up a (free) application on their service (including a database!):

• Sign up for a new account
• Create an application
• Set up git
• Create your public SSH key and upload it to Pagoda
• Commit to your repository and deploy your code

He also mentions a custom option Pagoda Box has included in their series - the Boxfile. This configuration file allows you to set up things like the environment you want your app to run in (PHP 5.3, MySQLi extension, etc) and set up some of the php.ini configuration settings. He also shows you how to set up the database instance and how to use their "pagoda" gem to create a temporary SSH tunnel from your development environment to their database server. He also briefly mentions the option they have of using a real domain name to point to your application.