Reviewing Pagoda Box Cloud Services

If you are familiar with Google’s App Engine, or Heroku, well… Pagoda Box is a cloud service to deploy PHP applications (be those CMSs, blogs or framework based apps).

I mentioned Heroku as the closest example of what does Pagoda Box because:
* You are deploying with Git
* It’s very much integrated with GitHub
* You can scale in any ways (by adding more resources to current box or by cloning current box)
* You can enable and disable add-ons for every app you use (from dedicated MySQL to Memcache, though some are not yet available in private beta).
* Free plan for testing/deployment

Pretty nice so far. So what else gives you Pagoda Box:
* First of all, it doesn’t ask you about your credit card!!! (It is a feature!)
* Writeable directories!!!
* SSH access to your writeable directories
* Custom rewrite rules, PHP version and PHP environment settings
* Team members!!!
* Free DNS aliases!!!
* Awesome UI for every tool you will deal with on Pagoda Box
* Awesome Stats Dashboard

I’ve been invited to a private beta recently (you can ask for an invite on twitter), so I tested their services on a WordPress/BuddyPress + Courseware deployment. The only problem I had was the lack of a tool like Bundler where I could specify from where what to pull (git sparse checkout might be an option I already recommended).
You can clone my repository or just have a look at wp-config.php (hint: follow the $_SERVER keywords) and .box files I had to change to make WordPress run on Pagoda Box.

Give it a shot here: courseware.pagodabox.com.

By the way, looks like Ubuntu powers their boxes, I would love to find out more about what other free software they use.

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated in any ways with the guys behind Pagoda Box, and what I wrote was done just because it was fun.