On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new post that compares three deployment tools to help you manage your VPS servers: RunCloud vs Forge vs ServerPilot.

When your website or web application has outgrown your shared hosting account, it is time to move it to the cloud, or into a virtual private server (VPS). [...] However, I can recall when I wanted to move my website to Amazon Web Services a few years ago, and it took me days to deploy the server and get it ready with PHP, MySQL and Apache.

Fortunately, that is not the case today as we have the help of some cool tools and third party services. I took a look at three similar services – RunCloud, ServerPilot and Laravel Forge – and compared them to see which performs best.

The post then walks through each service showing how to set up an account and talking about the pros and cons. Screenshots are included showing the UI and the steps you'll need to set up servers and providers. The post ends with a look at performance tests on the resulting VPSes including information like time of request completion, response time and successful/failed transactions. These results show a clear leader as far as performance results - Laravel Forge - but there are some reminders that performance is only part of what you should consider when selecting a service.

Aaron Pollock has posted a detailed guide that will help you get a full PHP development environment set up on a VPS, complete with a domain name and self-signed certificate.

I’ve been developing PHP apps for over eleven years. PHP remains 85% of what I do on a daily basis. Over that time, I’ve tried lots of WAMP packages to run sites on my Windows computers and, since going Mac, I’ve used the native Apache install that comes with Mac OS X. Six months ago, I decided to try out a remote VPS for my development. The results have been so good that I forget the pain I used to experience on a daily basis doing it any other way.

He walks you through the entire process (you'll need a VPS first) - it uses an Ubuntu-based setup, but the instructions are relatively easy to port over to other distributions. He helps you set up the system's hostname, install all needed packages/tools and generate the wildcard self-signed SSL certificate. Finally, he shows how to configure Apache's virtual hosts and set up a basic site.

ServerGrove has made an announcement on their blog today about an initiative they're starting to help in their own way to improve the PHP training ecosystem across the community - their "PHP Education Initiative".

PHP Training is an integral part of our PHP community and there are a lot of folks providing great training services making the PHP community safer and stronger. ServerGrove has long supported PHP education by sponsoring PHP User Groups and PHP Conferences, but we realised we have overlooked professional trainers. That is why we are pleased to announce our PHP Education Initiative.

Their part in the project is to provide resources (individual VPSes) for each of the individuals involved to give them a solid platform to work from. It's available to students, educator or user group leader involved in a PHP-centric training session. For more information on getting access to this resource, check out the post for contact information and what will be included.

The ServerGrove blog has a recent post for the Symfony2 users out there, showing how you can spool emails on a VPS/shared hosting using SwiftMailer and the Symfony2 bundle to interact with it.

When you send an email, the mailer communicates with a remote server in charge of receiving the message and of delivering it to the recipient. This process can cause your form to submit slowly as it depends on how fast the mail server responds. Spooling allows us to decouple the application execution line from the process of the sending one, two, or as many emails as we need.

They show you how to configure the SwiftMailerBundle with the mail server's settings, how to set up the command to send the emails and the settings you'll need to put in your cron file to run the "send" operation periodically.

On the VXTIndia blog there's a recent post that gives you a very complete guide to setting up a VPS server running Ubunut with all of the software you'd need to get a (more than) complete server up and running.

Every time you purchase a new Linux VPS, you need to go ahead and set it up for use. Even though we manage to do one server a month, we always seem to forget one thing or the other. So we decided to write down the things that we do. I thought it would be a good thing to share it with everybody as well, so that we could get a few comments about what we’re doing wrong, and people who do it the first time can probably pick up a few things from here.

Steps and software involved in their process include:

• Updating to the latest Ubuntu packages
• Creating other users for the system
• Installing the web environment (including PHP, MySQL, phpmyadmin and Apache2)
• Minin for monitoring
• Configuring IPTables
• Installing Fail2Ban

All of this comes complete with the additions you'll need to make to configuration files and the commands to get everything installed (via aptitude).

Stuart Herbert has decided to get in on the action and enter himself into the WinPHP Challenge (as sponsored by Ibuildings).

Generally, folks choose to deploy web-based applications on Windows Server because they already have Windows Server. Selling them something that will only work on Linux is a tough sell, so a competition like this that seeks to show off how well PHP works on Windows should be another small step forward for all those small ISVs like Box UK who want to sell products written in PHP - provided Microsoft actually do something marketing-wise with the results.

His idea is to build a PHP/.NET tool that can act as a web services gateway. He's already started development and blogs about getting the environment all set up - Windows Server 2008, IIS7 and PHP 5.2.9 For Windows.

He's made another post with an update on his status - finishing out the development environment with PHP up and running, setting up a database, picking an IDE (Visual Studio) and setting up a version control system (git).

In this post he takes about what he's trying to achieve with his application and some use case examples and in this other post some of the feedback he's gotten about his dev environment.

As a reminder from Ibuildings and Microsoft, time is running out for you to register for the 2009 WinPHP Challenge - the deadline is April 17th!

PHP is the language that runs the web, however, for a long time; PHP had a reputation of poor performance on Windows. Thanks to the hard work of the PHP Windows team and help from their friends in Redmond, Windows is now a first class citizen for PHP deployment as well as development. We asked two of the Core Windows PHP developers what they thought about the progress that PHP had made on Windows.

The contest is easy - make a brand new PHP application (not a port) build on a Windows and IIS7 setup. All needed licenses, software and hardware - each contestant gets their own Windows Server 2008 VPS to work on - that'll be used for the competition. Applications will be judged on originality, how complete they are, how/if they use Windows features and how well they're documented.

The contest will run from April 17th through May 31st to give you plenty of time to develop your application. You can find out more about the contest and register on this page off the Dutch PHP Conference wiki (the registration link is up there near the top).