Yet another post i hate to write: Our PHP hosting platform has been successfully attacked last Saturday, the 25th of May 2013. This is our story.
fortrabbit hiccups behind the scenes
Not an easy post to write: During the last two weeks a few of our customers had to experience some downtimes. Read here what basically is going on and what that means to us.
Free Web Hosting
tl;dr There is no such thing as free web hosting. That is just a bold headline to catch your attention.
XSL Supported: Welcome Symphony CMS!
We’re glad to announce that we’ve deployed the PHP XSL extension today allowing you to run Symphony CMS on Fortrabbit!
Symphony is a content management system powered by XML an XSLT. It’s quite mature, well tested (2.0 was released in 2008, current stable is 2.3.1) and focused on simplicity in design and complete control for the developers. Symphony is completely open source, but commercial support is offered. There is a huge set of extensions and macros in form of XSLT Utilities.
Currently, Symphony is migrating towards PHP 5.4, so there are still some quirks you have to deal with.
1,000 Developers
The counter of total accounts changed today from 3 to 4 digits – we are very excited. 1,000 PHP developers signed up, confirmed their email, created Apps and deployed code.
The majority of you explored our platform during the last 6 weeks. We belief 1,000 is just a fraction – there are zillions of other developers who never heard about us.
For us, 3 guys with a simple idea of better platform for PHP developers, this tiny number and your feedback shows that there was something missing in the current PaaS-World. It shows we are on the right way, with the right tools and the right attitude to make make it big.
A big THANK YOU goes out to Bruno Skvorc and Gabriel Manricks. They mentioned us in their articles at phpmaster.com and net.tutsplus.com
SSH Upgrade: PHP CLI and Git
As many of you requested: PHP and Git on the shell are here!
Optional PHP extensions
Have you seen our new PHP settings page? It’s huge.
Goodbye WebRechnung
Goodbye to you, my trusted friend.
We are busy with our new PHP developer cloud hosting. Currently we are preparing to shut down our old MISH services on the 30st of April 2013 in favor to the new platform.
A part of MISH is WebRechnung and we finally decided to take it down without replacement. WebRechnung was a free service to create and send invoices and estimates online – similar to FreshBooks, but especially designed to fit to the German tax laws. We have failed to make it a real business. This article is about our lessons learned.
Fortrabbit PHPipeline 2013
In spring 2012 i joined the Fortrabbit team – namely Frank and Uli. Both guys are highly skilled in their fields and very passionate about moving their hosting company to the next level. I became a kind of man-in-the-middle to connect the tech and the marketing/product world – as a person and as a coder (i write the glue code between the frontend and our infrastructure API). It was a great experience to build a hosting platform from the scratch, a product that is still beyond a MVP or buggy prototype.
Current Traction
During BETA and the first weeks after launch PHP developers from all over the world were paying attention. Early adoptors, some of the Top of the PHP Pops, web agencies and even competitors tweeted, signed up, played around and gave valuable feedback. But what’s most exciting: People love the product we’ve build, they pay money for the service and use it in production.
We know that PaaS is still under the radar of many PHP developers. But in 2013 developers, organizations and enterprises will start to rethink their current hosting situation and take advantage of managed cloud environments. (more…)