cloudControl: Platform-as-a-Service for PHP applications

Server administration has always been a hassle. It takes a lot of time and effort to get your website up and running as it should. Then again, good hosting is not cheap.cloudControl is the solution to both problems. cloudControl’s platform is made to act as perfect out of the box solution for developing and hosting complex PHP web-applications such as eCommerce systems, content management systems or Software-as-a-Service applications. cloudControl handles all resource-binding tasks on system administration, scalability and high availability, thereby enabling web-developers to fully focus on developing their applications.

cloudControl a German startup founded in January 2009. Currently a team of 6 people stand behind cloudControl: Beside the three co-founders three employees help in making the vision a reality. The company has been seed financed and cloudControl is in the process of raising another financial round.

cloudControl currently supports PHP applications. Other languages such as Java, Ruby and Python are planned and will be implemented soon.

cloudControl’s management and founding team consists of Philipp Strube (CEO), Tobias Wilken (CTO) and Thomas Ruland (CFO). Thomas has a previous working experience in finance. He worked as an investment banker at Swiss Bank UBS. At cloudControl Thomas is responsible for the business logic, co-operation projects and all financial topics.

Thomas talks about cloudControl and its features to YourStory

Idea behind cloudControl:

The cloudControl platform was born from the need of a fast, scalable platform for web developers. The founding team worked on a different business case before and was heavily disappointed with the lack of service oriented hosting and development solutions. So a first prototype was created and the idea was formed to start a new company with it. Quickly the concept and the prototype were awarded with the hosting award from the German association of ecommerce (eco). After that, and the notification that there is a huge demand for a PaaS solution the management team focused all efforts on bringing the prototype to a market stage.

The problem we address with cloudControl is the pain web-developers have with administrating the hardware for their projects. Being good developers, most are not specialised in system administration. Besides that, for most web-developers it’s a big hassle to take care of all administration parts like setups, backups, updates, etc. Their core competency is web-development. That’s why we created a one-stop shop solution were web developers can just push their code and run their applications - all other steps are taken care of by the platform itself. For the developers the platform is a place ready to start developing without worrying about any other stuff.

Features:

By employing add-ons like MySQL, MongoDB, Memcache and other third party add-ons, developers can extend the functionality of cloudControl’s platform to match the exact needs of their applications. Third party providers can offer their add-ons via cloudControl’s add-on marketplace and get access to a broad number of web developers. The developers benefit by gaining access to a wide variety of add-ons. cloudControl plays the orchestrating role.

See also http://cloudcontrol.com/cloud-hosting-en/high-availability-and-scalability/

Pricing:

At cloudControl, we offer a premium service with a free trial. The billing is based on resources used, so that our customers can minimize their hosting costs. cloudControl is a platform-as-a-Service solution, so there is no one-time payment, but payment on a regular, monthly basis.

Technology:

To eliminate lock-in effects, cloudControl uses proven open source components like the ones you find in a LAMP stack. This enables developers to run their software without any changes to the source code and without fearing any lock-in.

Diversification plans / Functions you plan to add:

The platform is in constant change to the better. Our main focus is the high availability of our customer’s projects, the next main focus is adding more features and functions to it. We do have partnerships for example with NewRelic, the application monitoring company and several new add-on providers are coming soon, such as Cloudant (who offer the Cloud Database CouchDB), Xeround (with their always-on Cloud based MySQL Database) and Sourcepole (with their no SQL Database).

We also offer an Addon-partnership program, where one can qualify as an Addon- provider and offer new features and functions to all of our customers on our Add-on Marketplace.

The best part about cloudControl’s Cloud Hosting Platform is that it’s free to get started and sign-up is instant.

Visit http://cloudcontrol.com for more info.