CatN Cloud PHP Hosting Initial Thoughts / Review

CatN was created by a company called Fubra, probably best known for being the company behind ClearBooks, although the number of other digital pies they have fingers in would suggest an extra terrestrial number of digits on each hand.

Their latest offering is a PHP cloud hosting service, which takes its place alongside a growing number of contemporaries such as PHPFog, Orchestra.io and CloudControl amonst others. They caught my attention above the others as they have their own UK based data centre, as opposed to using Amazon EC2 and/or being US based.

Anyway, I signed up to their beta; here are some screen grabs and notes on how I found the process of setting up my first vCluster.

Initial vCluster Setup

Upon signing up for a Fubra passport account (that you can take with you to their other services if you wish to do so), you will then be taken to your control panel area to create your first cluster.

The set up process is completely intuitive and takes you through step-by-step. The next thing it asks for is a prefix for your cluster. All subsequent virtual clusters will use this prefix within their hostnames.

Selecting a package

Having set a prefix, you can now add your first vCluster, choosing the package that suits your requirements (it looks like it's easy to upgrade any time and overages are charged per GB).

You'll then be taken to enter your payment details, whereby your cluster will be created.

Setting a credit limit

If you're concerned about your site getting BBC'd or Stephen Fry'd, you can set a credit limit so that any huge traffic spikes don't bankrupt you. Nice.

SSH Keys

All vClusters have SSH access which is great, so if the terminal is your thing, you can input your SSH key(s) here or come back and add them later.

MySQL Database

Each vCluster comes with a MySQL database, so the next step allows you to set your password for this.

Setup Complete

That was easy! That's the account ready to go, and you get a nice summary screen showing you all your details, along with a link to the public hostname. 

Enter the hostname in your browser, and there it is, your new vCluster hosting account ready for you to start uploading files:

Testing connections

A quick SSH connection test proves successful and you can see the root directories here:

And you can connect to the database remotely using your favourite desktop GUI if you wish. Here I am connecting via SSH in Navicat:

Multiple domains and databases

You can host mulitple domains and subdomains on each vCluster but as far as I can see, you can only have ONE MySQL database per vCluster. This does feel a bit limiting - it would be nice to have more than one. I did try creating another database via SSH but got an access denied error:

Summary

The setup process for the CatN vCluster couldn't be more simple. Their control panel UI is smooth, fast and easy on the eye; often you find new hosting providers have got great techies on board, but no eye-candy makers for putting the gloss on.

Ready-to-go PHP platforms like this do appeal to me. I've tried bare-bones VPS providers such as Linode and ServerLove and while it's very empowering to have complete root control over the server from the terminal, practically I've just found it's one extra thing to worry about when you're running a small agency. A PHP platform-as-a-service fills the middle ground between low-cost, bare-bones providers and managed (and expensive) hosts.

Obviously I've not given the vCluster a go in the real world so can't comment on this yet. I'll perhaps report back here once I've run a cluster for a month or so to see how things go.