Pogoapp: PaaS hosting startup by a couple Mefites

November 5, 2012 5:21 PM

Pogoapp: PaaS hosting startup by a couple Mefites
We started out as Rails developers trying to script capistrano deployments and somehow ended up hacking together a full platform-as-a-service system, run on dedicated servers, with S3-compatible distributed storage and a REST API/build process that's mostly heroku-compatible (i.e. Procfiles and buildpacks and one-time-processes). We've got support for Ruby 1.9.3 and 2.0 preview including Rails, node.js/CoffeeScript, python, php, etc etc.

We've just begun to expand beyond running our own apps and those of a few of our friends and clients, handing out free trial accounts to a small number of the people on our mailing list, but if anyone reading wants one, just memail me with your email address and I'll set you one up right away.

We'd love to get some feedback on the whole shebang, from the service, website, documentation, any specific features you might be dying to have, etc etc. We're also, if/when there's more than two of us, intending to run this as a non-traditional tech startup (i.e. employee managed, socially conscious), so if anyone has experience with anything along those lines we'd love to pick your brain!

Role: programmer

posted by crayz (7 comments total)

Good luck. Any plans to support NodeJS?
posted by lipsum at 1:56 AM on November 6, 2012

lipsum- Yeah we support node.js right now. A bunch of our internal infrastructure runs on node
posted by crayz at 4:50 AM on November 6, 2012

crayz - what are your goals? why another hosted app engine? what do you say to developers who ask about the continuity of this service?
posted by lipsum at 8:32 AM on November 6, 2012

There's only really a few companies doing multi-language/platform app hosting (Heroku/dotcloud being the main examples). There's a lot of other PaaS companies, but many are single-language (Gondor/NodeJitsu/AppHarbor), or there's some OpenStack/CloudFoundry stuff like AppFog, which in our opinion is really not aimed at serious production apps at the moment, and may have problems adding features in the future because of for cooperation between those separate, bureaucratic cloud and app hosting projects

In addition, nearly all the existing app hosting are built on top of existing cloud platforms (either EC2/Linode/Rackspace, or OpenStack), which we think results in more lock-in than we have with a single vertically integrated/self-hosted platform built on dedicated hosting

I used to work for a major web hosting company, and I think the writing has been on the wall for a while now - it's inevitable that the software running most websites, let's say 10 years from now, will look a lot more like app hosting than it does like most web hosting today. Simultaneously there's a ton of web devs today who are running vs. cloud VMs to save money on app hosting, but still need to do a lot of their own sysadmin/deployment work which they don't have the desire or necessarily skill-set to do

So it looks like there's only a few players and a lot of current interest and likely future expansion in the overall market, and because we've got control of the entire stack down to metal, we can quickly differentiate e.g. by offering distributed filesystem storage (something we've already built into the platform and enabled for one of our clients), running a localized version in other countries (right now our servers are in Canada, and other people have expressed interest in a European PaaS for better data-protection laws), etc etc

If you mean business continuity, right now we're really just getting started with the trial hosting, and have more interested signups than we have server space. We wouldn't recommend anyone bet their company on our service today - we're looking for people interested in testing out a new platform and giving feedback on any particular needs they might have that are unmet by the handful of existing PaaS hosts
posted by crayz at 9:54 AM on November 6, 2012

BTW we're often hanging out in the #pogoapp IRC channel, on irc.freenode.net, for general questions, recommendations, account support, etc.
posted by crayz at 11:03 AM on November 6, 2012

How about pricing?
posted by floatboth at 9:17 AM on November 18, 2012

We finally now have beta pricing, $5 per 256MB RAM, 1GB disk, 5 processes :)
posted by crayz at 2:33 PM on March 4