Unfortunately I only had a chance to play with aptana cloud as an individual but the team features certainly do look like they could be really useful. It’s nice to have it all integrated etc. I would feel a bit nervous about storing large projects on aptana cloud without knowing more about how its back-ed up etc.

I’m personally looking for Django support! Rails would be cool too, but not for me

I have unfortunately not been able to get a site up and running for long as I’m using RadRails which is not yet supported in the cloud although Chris Willians did set up a rails environment for me to have a play with for a short period.

I too have concerns over pricing and despite several requests for information on this, have yet to be told if there is any intention of providing host re-selling services as this side of things seem to have been neglected somewhat.

Rightly or wrongly I get the impression that Aptana have concentrated on the team development environment providing a superb “in house” solution with integrated subversion and team development support but there seems to be very little info on how a web site developer writing web apps for third parties can sell their cloud sites.

I have found Aptana to be superb in their responses to ASAP reports with very quick turn around times and this is incredibly encouraging.

I can’t wait for rails support and really would like to see more from them to support the freelance web site developer. As I say, the whole process from deployment to site maintenance is a total refreshing breeze

James West

Thanks for the added info. It’ll be interesting to see where they end up with it.

Yeah, I wonder about the backend as well. As you suggest, it sounds a bit like shared hosting, but it also sounds a bit like VMs…

– T.J.

24 hour support adds $0.99 per day, and a unlimited developers adds $0.33 per day.

I don’t think it sounds too expensive, its only compared to some shared hosting solutions. However shared hosting doesn’t cut it for many projects.

I do wonder how it all works in the back-end. Is this effectively shared hosting with a nice front on it? Or is it based on VM’s?

Very interesting stuff, thanks for the first look. One comment:

“…up to 2 GB of ram and 25 GB hard disc for $8.22 a day. Seems fairly reasonably priced…”

As you say, pricing is probably still in flux, but I’d want that number to come down markedly. $8.22/day is about $250/month, for 2GB of RAM and 25GB of disk, “up to” 95% of 8 CPUs only at peaks, business-hours only support for critical issues, and one admin an one developer. In the dedicated server market, that would be substantially overpriced. Obviously the cloud has advantages beyond a dedicated server (big ones) which makes up some of that gap, but…

I’d *really* like to see how that number changes with 24/7/365 support and a larger dev/admin team. I’m not running a commercial site on any infrastructure where I can’t get someone on the phone if there’s a critical outage, regardless of what time it is where they are. And it isn’t clear to me why the size of my dev or admin teams is any of their business.

Still, very exciting stuff. Would hate to see it fall down on pricing.

Thanks again for the sneak peek,
–
T.J. Crowder
tj / crowder software / com

Thanks for your positive feedback and review of the cloud, but I did notice one thing I wanted to comment on…

Regarding the lack of Pear support, we’ve decided not to bundle it in for several reasons, such as this being a multi-user environment and not wanting to have everybody sharing one local Pear repository. We figured the best solution would be to use go-pear.php to create your own local instance of pear. This basically will set up pear in your doc root for you and provides a nice web interface for downloading / updating / installing pear packages. Check it out:
http://pear.php.net/go-pear

Like I said, we think this should be a good solution, but I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts as well.