Moving from WAMP website to Heroku and RDS

Hosportal.com starts to grow up

We recently moved our startup from a standalone server that has served us well for 4 years, onto something that will be able to scale better, and be managed by 24 hour resources.

We had a lot of options to consider, and this will take you through our decisions.

1. Deciding on a location for the website to be hosted.

We decided on the following criteria in terms of webhosting provider:

The providers need to be:

- Large enough company (we don't want it going bust)

- Enable us to scale (both horizontally and vertically)

- Contain an ecosystem of service providers to provide add-on services

- Easy to manage (we don't want to pay for full time operations resources just yet)

- Needed to work with PHP and Mysql (as thats what we have, although lots of problems here...)

- Could deploy code automatically from GitHub/Bitbucket to the hosting provider

a) Large enough company:

When we started looking for 'large enough' companies, we used the most obvious tool (Google search) in order to find out the market place (in June 2012). The reason for 'large enough' is to make sure that the company we choose will not suddenly run out of money and disappear. The cloud market is still very immature, and there are lots of companies that disappear suddenly. (Update: at the time of writing, despite our efforts, we originally chose Xeround.com as our mysql cloud provider, however in the last 2 weeks, they have 'decided a change in direction is needed' and we had to quickly move to Amazon Web Services.) We had the following list of potential providers:

VPS.net - Virtual Hosting provider, that provides a cloud like service.

AWS - Amazon Web Services

HP, Azure, Rackspace - Other large Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) providers

dotCloud.com - Somewhere between (IAAS and PAAS) provider

Xeround.com - MySQL cloud database provider

Orchestra (EngineYard.com) - A PHP platform provider, that had been purchased by a Ruby on Rails company

PHP

PagodaBox.com - Another PAAS PHP provider

b) Enable us to scale

-