Pagoda Box was the first true PHP PaaS — and we love it! fortrabbit and Pagoda Box are on the same mission: developers delight. Apart from that, mostly everything else is different. Pagoda Box runs on SoftLayer, fortrabbit on AWS. Pagoda Box is based in the US, fortrabbit in the EU. … Not sure which one to use? Both are great. Try them out if you have the time, otherwise: ask your peers.
Features & responsibilities
Hosting providers are like apples and oranges. This table might help comparing:
| aPaaS | Shared hosting | VPS | Managed hosting | IaaS | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sample providers |
fortrabbit, Heroku, platform.sh |
GoDaddy, 1&1, HostGator |
DigitalOcean, Linode, Server4you |
SysEleven, Peer1, Rackspace |
AWS, Windows Azure, Google Cloud |
| Price level | low - high | very low - low | low - high | high - very high | medium - very high |
| Complexity | medium | low | medium | medium | very high |
| Developer features | available | n/a | your responsibility | on request | your responsibility |
| Scaling | limitless, simple | downtime, limited | n/a | on request | complex, limitless |
| Deployment workflows | included | n/a | your responsibility | your responsibility | your responsibility |
| Operating system | managed | managed | your responsibility | managed | your responsibility |
| Security | managed | low | your responsibility | managed | your responsibility |
| Skill requirements | developer | developer | developer & admin | developer | developer & admin & cloud architect |