Top all-time · #6536
fortrabbit blog
Company blog · blog.fortrabbit.comprogrammingwebbusiness
fortrabbit blog is the company blog at blog.fortrabbit.com, writing about programming, web and business. Since 2012, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 95 times, most often “9 billing mistakes to avoid for startups”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link fortrabbit's blog for its comparisons of PHP PaaS hosting providers and its pieces on PaaS consolidation, price rises and the closure of Parse. Most comments are links paired with promotional plugs.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Posts from the team behind fortrabbit on PHP hosting, Craft CMS and Laravel deployment, platform changes and running a bootstrapped company since 2012.
Most-linked posts?
- 9 billing mistakes to avoid for startups2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-03-24
- Market overview: Domain services for developers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-07-18
- /cloudscapes-rerevisited2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-03-15
- Is your database password safely stored?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-09-08
- Testing Code for PHP 72 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-10-23
- Deploying code with rsync2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-04-03
- 10 pillars of modern PHP development2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-06-04
- Is PaaS dead?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-01-13
What Hacker News says?
Too bad. I admire them for giving people a year and giving some helpful tools. I'm glad Parse's winding down is less painful than "We're gone in 1 month, good luck, bye!". Another data point for the "Is PaaS dead?" conversation. http://blog.fortrabbit.com/cloudscapes-rerevisited
Comment linking /cloudscapes-rerevisited
on “Facebook is closing Parse”Submitted Mastering HTTP Caching – from request to response and everything as a story · 134 points
HN discussionI can relate. We provide a small PaaS-like hosting service, kinda similar to Railway (but more niche). We have recently re-elaborated our choice for AWS (since $$$) as infra provider, but will now stick to it [1]. We started with colocation 20 years ago. For a tiny provider it was quite a hustle (but also an experience). We just had too many single point of failures and we found ourselves dealing with physical serve…
Comment linking /infra-research-2024
on “So you want to build your own data center”Submitted Is PaaS dead? as a story · 133 points
HN discussionI've spent a lot of my career updating/fixing/replacing aging PHP apps, so here are some pointers: 0. Ignore PHP8 for now. There's much more community support for PHP7, so fix it up to work on PHP 7.4 first. 1. My first task is always to use a code scanner to test if the codebase is PHP7 compatible (or PHP 5.6, or the next version on from whatever you're running). See https://blog.fortrabbit.com/php-testing for an i…
Comment linking /php-testing
on “PHP 8: Before and After”Submitted Hosting performance / Hosting convenience as a story · 18 points
HN discussion7 Years ago I blogged about if the Platform as Service business model is dead [0]. The PaaS hosting market share by Gartner was never met. Many startups in the space died. We (fortrabbit) are offering "PHP as a Service" for more than 10 years now. It works for us as a small business. I am happy to see new services serving the same itch getting created today. [0] https://blog.fortrabbit.com/cloudscapes-rerevisited
Comment linking /cloudscapes-rerevisited
on “I Miss Heroku's DevEx”Submitted Why we failed – Good product, not enough waves as a story · 17 points
HN discussionwe also did a far less sophisticated HTTP/2 reality check: https://blog.fortrabbit.com/http2-reality-check about the same result: real world performance boost was not soooo big.
Comment linking /http2-reality-check
on “Real-world HTTP/2: 400GB of images per day”Submitted What the hosting and the meat market have in common as a story · 13 points
HN discussionHappy to see UpCloud on HN. We are trying to consider them for a long time, just haven't found the time. https://blog.fortrabbit.com/infra-research-2024 There is also https://european-alternatives.eu/
Comment linking /infra-research-2024
on “European Cloud, Global Reach”Submitted How to NOT get a job interview at our small startup as a story · 6 points
HN discussionWe run a PHP hosting platform and that tickled us as well. We were especially upset with the common sense that storing secrets in ENV vars is a good idea — in PHP those vars are easily exposed. See our blog post: http://blog.fortrabbit.com/how-to-keep-a-secret — here we suggested: 1. create a secret key, store it with the code of your App 2. store the encrypted credentials in env vars Later on we even launched our o…
Comment linking /how-to-keep-a-secret
on “Ask HN: In a microservice architecture, how do you handle managing secrets?”Submitted Show HN: Fortrabbit PHP PaaS Launched in US as a story · 6 points
HN discussionFree is all fun and jokes until someone loses an eye. PaaS companies had a rough year in 2015, with many companies closing down and Heroku changing their pricing. (A great article is here: https://blog.fortrabbit.com/cloudscapes-rerevisited ) This consolidation will happen to all industries where companies keep underselling their products. The weak ones will go down and eventually everyone else will raise the prices…
Comment linking /cloudscapes-rerevisited
on “The web's original sin”Submitted First Fortran PaaS as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI found that there are different numbers on the spread of old PHP around, depending on who you are asking, WordPress and Composer are also having usage stats. The numbers from w3tech are maybe not that accurate, as they are probably generated by sniffing the X-Powered-By header. PLUG: We have blogged about PHP deadlines as well: https://blog.fortrabbit.com/on-php-deadlines
Comment linking /on-php-deadlines
on “Around 62% of all Internet sites will run an unsupported PHP version in 10 weeks”Submitted The tyranny of inconsistent keyboard shortcuts as a story · 4 points
HN discussionA sympathize, but my EU biz bets on US tech. We are in a tricky position now. So every 'Look ma I moved away from US big tech' post triggers me. Details: https://blog.fortrabbit.com/us-against-them
Comment linking /us-against-them
on “I Moved My Digital Stack to Europe”Submitted Impolite websites practices, number 5 will shock you as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI think Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) said once: "The best customer service is no customer service". Shameless Plug: There are much more cloud services out there these days. It's not just two. Have a look at the PHP ones here: http://blog.fortrabbit.com/comparing-cloud-hosting-platforms...
Comment linking /comparing-cloud-hosting-platforms/
on “Heroku vs. AWS Revisited”Submitted TUI Design Patterns as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHappy Nuxt user. Congrats to the team. I am concerned about how software frameworks are getting integrated into hosting platforms these days (I run a small hosting service). Blogged about it here: https://blog.fortrabbit.com/web-hosting-and-open-source
Comment linking /web-hosting-and-open-source
on “The Future of Nuxt”Submitted Modifying the C standard library to evaluate shebang directives in user space as a story · 3 points
HN discussionwe have used freshbooks — as it is a leader and has an API, but it's obviously not built to be used for lo's of automated SaaS invoices. some more here: http://blog.fortrabbit.com/battling-billing
Comment linking /battling-billing
on “Ask HN: Startups, what accounting software do you use?”Submitted HTTP/2 under realistic test scenarios as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHere is my comparison of current and upcoming PHP Paas Hosting Services: http://blog.fortrabbit.com/comparing-cloud-hosting-platforms... I strongly believe in this kind of service - old school hosting is dead meat in my eyes. Shameless Pug: We recently launched our own PHP PaaS
Comment linking /comparing-cloud-hosting-platforms/
on “Ask HN: What hosting do you use for personal projects?”Submitted 9 billing mistakes to avoid for startups as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHi, why does it have to be for free? hosting resources cost money. find some more alternatives here: http://blog.fortrabbit.com/comparing-cloud-hosting-platforms... plug: i am co-founder of fortrabbit (PaaS).
Comment linking /comparing-cloud-hosting-platforms/
on “Ask HN: Best free tier PaaS?”Submitted HTTP/2 why we don't do hasty changes as a story · 3 points
HN discussion