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I have an interesting perspective on this since my startup, flooha.com is extremely similar, but actually better in some ways IMHO. First of all, AFAIK, the web platform installer just sets up your PC to be a web server (IIS, mysql, etc...), then installs a default setup for the application you chose to install. So, you can play with it on your local PC, but it is not a public website unless your PC is your web server. So, if you don't have at least a VPS, you cannot use this to create your website. The blogger has it wrong when he says you can install on azure. Flooha does exactly the same thing, except on a real, public facing web server. You can use it immediately on a free subdomain like username.flooha.com (on an EC2 instance) or you can sign up for hosting and use it to install software on your web hosting account (a dedicated server). There are already other apps that do exactly the same thing like Fantastico, Simple Scripts, Installatron, etc... Nothing new or revolutionary there. We will soon implement the ability to auto-install on any cPanel or Plesk server and the ability for developers to upload their PHP and Rails apps. It's not clear from the MS web site whether you can install these web apps "in the cloud" (on azure?) or not. Even if you can, do you still get all of the other features of a traditional web host like a control panel, ssh, email, backups, cron jobs, forwarders, statistics, file manager, etc...? If you can install to the cloud, obviously the auto-scaling aspect is great even though most website will never need it. Flooha's unique service is the ability to auto-install addons. Apps like WordPress now have their own addon (plugin) installer, but many apps, especially new ones, do not. Also, addons that are not in the WP repository are not available for auto-install. This is the gap that Flooha fills, in addition to auto-install of apps, 1-click backups to S3, 1-click restores, private addons and more. If you've ever worked with an app like osCommerce or MediaWiki, you'll know that installing addons is a real pain. I'll admit to being jealous of MS's army of people working on this as well as their visually pleasing website, but I'm not particularly impressed by the service. I'm curious if sriramk or someone else more familiar with the web platform installer can give more insight on the service and rebutt some of my comments. If people are really that impressed, I think I need to increase my marketing budget. |