Release early, release often
This article is a bit older and might be outdated.
Ready or Not - here i come? Can we really go live that early? Shouldn't we do a public BETA period to gain more feedback first? __ We think: YES we can! You can read it in any startup advice book: Launch early. Our new cloud hosting service is general available since yesterday. We build it within a fairly short time (~12 months) and had only a short closed BETA period (~1 month). We do managed hosting for over 5 years - a business where reliability is one of the core values. And Platform as a Service is just a label for a modern approach of scalable hassle-free hosting solutions. This PaaS market is very young and still a changing category in the wide field of cloud hosting. Listening to customers and their needs will influence the way current services work.
# Is our platform really mature or yet another MVP or even just a tech demo?
We hope that you take the time and check it out yourself. Our full featured freemium plan comes handy here. Please consider:
- It's built on top of AWS. We are standing on shoulders of giants. We don't have to take care of all the bare metal.
- Our design is paranoid. Relying on AWS is not enough. Nearly all components are redundant and in different availability zones.
- The underlying core software is proven to be stable. De facto standard hosting components: Debian, Apache, Puppet, grsecurity & HAproxy
- We are experienced. Our first generation hosting, a dedicated stack of own hardware, is still running. Uptime: 99.9%
We are a a small agile team. Instead of trying to build an "egg-laying wool-milk-sow" we focused on a optimized PHP stack. It's just LAMP with deployment candy on top, but we like it. The most important features, the ones you will need in production, are included - with attention to detail. The documentation is very complete. Our unique r/w-storage solution allows all type of work-flows. Billing works, you can pay with credit card and will get a nice PDF invoice each month. We tested everything intensively and integrated feedback from our BETA testers (thanks again!). From our perspective we've released a very solid 1.0 stable. But it's software and it cuts both ways: Things go wrong sometimes but they are easy to fix. We are looking forward to get more great feedback (criticism & props) to move on the next release.