General FAQs
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What is the "Cloud" anyways?
The 'Cloud' is a new way to think about your back-end computing needs. Rather than worrying about where to host your web sites, how to configure
your web server, and how to set up additional services, the Cloud enables you to push all of these concerns and worries to someone else, and more importantly, somewhere else. It's all handled for you on the internet, dynamically and completely managed. In short, all of your technology needs on the back-end are handled for you as a service, much like your electric or phone bill. Sometimes, this is also referred to as 'Cloud Computing' [1]. The Cloud enables you to save time, money and headaches.
What is Aptana Cloud?
Aptana Cloud provides scalable PHP, MySQL, Apache and Aptana Jaxer app platforms as a service. Production and staging environments are both provided out of the box. In addition multiple software as a service solutions are provided supporting the entirety of your application lifecycle: from development to deployment to management and monitoring. To make this the ultimate in ease, these solutions are also integrated directly into the workflows of Aptana Studio. These software services include hosted source control (SVN), team member management, database tools, one-click backups, web stats and site performance statistics, and an active monitoring and alert system that will notify you of key events in the system when they happen.
The result is the ultimate in ease and efficiency -- an integrated development platform that puts the power of cloud computing to work for you, and costing far less to operate than doing it yourself.
What does it cost? What's the pricing?
The Cloud software and tools are free. All you pay for is what you use after you set up your site, app or project in the Cloud. Pricing starts at a mere 4 cents an hour for 256 MB of RAM, 5GB of storage, and a terabyte of bandwidth. But more importantly Cloud saves you time and money. There's no set up time or cost. Just deploy and go! And even before you go live and scale Cloud saves you time and money by providing hosted source control, staging servers, and team collaboration tools -- all integrated right into Aptana Studio / Eclipse.
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Why choose Aptana Cloud over computing utilities like Amazon EC2?
We think computing utilities are a great idea. In fact Aptana Cloud is built to compliment them. When you use Aptana Cloud you not only get the on-demand scalability from such computing utilties, you also get pre-configured app stacks ready to run your apps, Cloud management tools integrated right into your IDE, and access to hosted source control and staging servers that help you work more efficiently with your team and customers. And with pricing starting at 4 cents an hour, 60% less than Amazon EC2's starting prices, it just makes sense.
Why choose Aptana Cloud over old-fashioned ISP or VPS hosting services?
With Cloud the inefficiencies of working with VPS and traditional hosts are a thing of the past. Instead of mere FTP or SSH accounts to a server with fixed capacities, Aptana Cloud gives you the on-demand scalability of Cloud computing, plus services like source control, team management and staging that integrate right into your IDE and workflow. At less than $1 a day to start, you earn back your investment fast and avoid the typical headaches of VPS through the end-to-end ease of Aptana Cloud. (And yes you get SSH and SFTP too!)
Why did Aptana choose Joyent as its first cloud computing infrastructure provider for Aptana Cloud?
Joyent serves over 1 billion page views a month, including some of the largest Facebook apps out there. There are now over 4000 PHP apps running on Joyent and their expertise in hosted Ruby on Rails environments is renowned. Unlike Amazon, though they intend to get there, Joyent provides static IP addresses which many of our customers told us they wanted. In addition, the modularity of Joyent's data center enabled us to pass lower entry level prices directly through to you -- up to 60% lower compared to Amazon EC2's entry level pricing.
Will you ever support other cloud computing providers like Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine?
We've conceived Aptana Cloud such that in the future we will be able to support additional backend providers. This will be based on customer demand.
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