difficultly of scaling?

[ohdang888]

Anyone got an opinion on that new hosting site that some people are getting all excited about : http://www.phpfog.com

 

I had my doubts about whether or not its work switching, and sent them an email about how i don't understand the whole easily "scaling your application"

 

This was their response:

So it is true, that you can scale out or up your application with other providers, but it's a lot of work. And typically the challenges that I heard other customers are having is that they get a huge spike of traffic and then they can't scale fast enough to handle the traffic and their provider shuts down the service. It's not common scenario, but it happens.

 

Also Scaling isn't just about scaling up/out, it's also about scaling down. Sometimes you might need a lot of servers for a short while and then you need to scale back because you won't need them anymore. For example, an application that's only used during business hours would need to be up and running fast with many servers 9-5 but with less thereafter. With standard hosting you'd have to pay for all of it the entire time; with scalable hosting you pay for what you use, and no more.

 

With PHP Fog if you get a spike of traffic you can just move the scroller and apply the change and the PHP Fog system does all the magic behind the scenes in about 30 seconds.

 

Here's my main question: is it really that difficult to scale with other hosting providers? Right now, i use myhosting.com, and it seems like the process would be easy enough: contact them, upgrade your package, and you're done... at least thats what i thought?

 

Any thoughts?

[Philip]

Scalability on a normal dedicated box can be pretty tough when you hit the limits of the current box and you need to expand outward. With cloud hosting it's a lot easier and you have less downtime when scaling the box itself.

 

I haven't used phpfog before, but I've used a few different VPS/cloud hosts before and have found it easier if I quickly need 1GB more ram I pretty much can instantly have it.

[xylex]

The founder's local to me and he pitched PHP Fog a few months ago at our PHP meetup.  With what you're saying about other hosting providers works for small scale sites- for shared hosting, as long as you're not consuming more resources than a hosting providers entire server, you can just go with a bigger package.  PHP Fog is more geared towards larger scale deployments that spike to more than a single server's resources- when you have those spikes, you can easily scale up to add more VPS instances and requests will be load balanced across these apps.  The majority of webhosts don't even offer this service, and no one else that I know of is currently offering a web interface to automatically do this deployment.

 

As for the overall appeal of PHPFog, I think it's biggest shortcoming is the lack of easy database scaling.  In your typical LAMP application, unless you're doing a lot of image or video manipulation or something, or your script has coding issues, you'll bottleneck at the database well before you bottleneck at the Apache/PHP side of things, so scaling across more Apache/PHP isn't going to get you any performance gains.

[ohdang888]

As for the overall appeal of PHPFog, I think it's biggest shortcoming is the lack of easy database scaling.  In your typical LAMP application, unless you're doing a lot of image or video manipulation or something, or your script has coding issues, you'll bottleneck at the database well before you bottleneck at the Apache/PHP side of things, so scaling across more Apache/PHP isn't going to get you any performance gains.

 

Ya i've read that as well, and it makes sense. But how is that ever overcome (obviously it can be, but thats so confusing to me). Is the only way to do that through multiple database servers?

[ohdang888]

Looks like they're solving that DB problem now, actually. Once again, confuses me how thats solved but ya maybe this is worth it