I came across Redhat's upcoming PAAS offering ,OpenShift, a couple of weeks ago, and signed up about 5 days back.
Openshift is like a VPS, but one where you don't need to worry about managing the OS.
When you sign up you get 3 free 'gears'. Each gear gets 500MB RAM, and 1GB disk space on an Amazon EC2 instance. The resources you get are independent of server processes. So, the 500MB RAM you get is exclusively for your applications, and not for running the OS.
You can choose to deploy your app on a single gear or let the app auto scale depending on traffic.
They've got easy installers for popular applications like PHP, JBoss, Drupal, Wordpress etc.
My sites use Drupal, so I tried out their installation, but wasn't happy with the way things were laid out, and started over and did a manual install (which was quite complicated!)
Installing applications is a bit different from what I was used to on my regular shared hosting. You've got to use Git, instead of FTP. You can use FTP too, but using Git's the preferred method, and it's easier to set-up.
Once you've got your server setup, you've got to install Ruby and Redhats tools to access it. Your app is protected by public key encryption, and not a password, so you've got to install a program (Putty) to generate and manage your keys.
You need to SSH into your server to get a lot of things done, which is a bit slow, and has a learning curve, but is quite effective.
You can redirect your domain to resolve at the app you created. But by default it only accepts your domain with the www prefix. So, "www.yoursite.com" will lead to your site on readhat, but just "yoursite.com" won't work.
DNS wildcard 301 and 302 redirects don't work well, because they just take all traffic all from your naked domain, eg. yoursite.com/link1 back to your homepage i.e. "www.yoursite.com".
Http rewrites are reported not to work as well, and I didn't check.
However, I use Cloudflare as my CDN. It protects my site from attacks, makes it faster, and also lets you set page rules. Using it, I was able to redirect all traffic to the correct URL. And, it's a free service as well!
It's still in the 'developer preview' phase. Once they launch they'll still have a free tier, but they'll also let you scale your app if you need more resources. (Right now, you can't scale beyond your 3 free gears)
I've been using OpenShift for a few days now. It's definitely got a learning curve. But, if you're launching a new site, and want to save on hosting costs till your site starts bringing in some money, it's a good way to get started.
It's also a nice way to familiarise yourself with new technologies.
There's lots of documentation, and a helpful community to help you out. The support staffs pretty approachable too.
But, there are a few downsides.
Scarily, their terms and conditions state that all your content is theirs, or something to that effect. I think that they've put that in so that they don't get sued, and while I don't think that a company built on Open Source principles will steal, it's still something to consider before you decide to use their services.
Secondly, not all their apps scale. Drupal, Wordpress etc, don't scale. MySQL doesn't scale either.
So, you're stuck with running your sites on limited resources (but a lot more than you'll get if you're using shared hosting), unless Redhat manages to implement scaling once they're out of the preview phase.
They don't guarantee uptime either. I don't think that'll be a problem, but who knows?
I think it's a great offering.
You can sign up at: https://www.openshift.com/
They don't ask for your credit card number like Amazon, and they seem pretty committed to the free tier offering. They've got a good help desk, and an active community.
Openshift is like a VPS, but one where you don't need to worry about managing the OS.
When you sign up you get 3 free 'gears'. Each gear gets 500MB RAM, and 1GB disk space on an Amazon EC2 instance. The resources you get are independent of server processes. So, the 500MB RAM you get is exclusively for your applications, and not for running the OS.
You can choose to deploy your app on a single gear or let the app auto scale depending on traffic.
They've got easy installers for popular applications like PHP, JBoss, Drupal, Wordpress etc.
My sites use Drupal, so I tried out their installation, but wasn't happy with the way things were laid out, and started over and did a manual install (which was quite complicated!)
Installing applications is a bit different from what I was used to on my regular shared hosting. You've got to use Git, instead of FTP. You can use FTP too, but using Git's the preferred method, and it's easier to set-up.
Once you've got your server setup, you've got to install Ruby and Redhats tools to access it. Your app is protected by public key encryption, and not a password, so you've got to install a program (Putty) to generate and manage your keys.
You need to SSH into your server to get a lot of things done, which is a bit slow, and has a learning curve, but is quite effective.
You can redirect your domain to resolve at the app you created. But by default it only accepts your domain with the www prefix. So, "www.yoursite.com" will lead to your site on readhat, but just "yoursite.com" won't work.
DNS wildcard 301 and 302 redirects don't work well, because they just take all traffic all from your naked domain, eg. yoursite.com/link1 back to your homepage i.e. "www.yoursite.com".
Http rewrites are reported not to work as well, and I didn't check.
However, I use Cloudflare as my CDN. It protects my site from attacks, makes it faster, and also lets you set page rules. Using it, I was able to redirect all traffic to the correct URL. And, it's a free service as well!
It's still in the 'developer preview' phase. Once they launch they'll still have a free tier, but they'll also let you scale your app if you need more resources. (Right now, you can't scale beyond your 3 free gears)
I've been using OpenShift for a few days now. It's definitely got a learning curve. But, if you're launching a new site, and want to save on hosting costs till your site starts bringing in some money, it's a good way to get started.
It's also a nice way to familiarise yourself with new technologies.
There's lots of documentation, and a helpful community to help you out. The support staffs pretty approachable too.
But, there are a few downsides.
Scarily, their terms and conditions state that all your content is theirs, or something to that effect. I think that they've put that in so that they don't get sued, and while I don't think that a company built on Open Source principles will steal, it's still something to consider before you decide to use their services.
Secondly, not all their apps scale. Drupal, Wordpress etc, don't scale. MySQL doesn't scale either.
So, you're stuck with running your sites on limited resources (but a lot more than you'll get if you're using shared hosting), unless Redhat manages to implement scaling once they're out of the preview phase.
They don't guarantee uptime either. I don't think that'll be a problem, but who knows?
I think it's a great offering.
You can sign up at: https://www.openshift.com/
They don't ask for your credit card number like Amazon, and they seem pretty committed to the free tier offering. They've got a good help desk, and an active community.
