I knew I was missing something when I was listing out some hosting providers for developer-focused cloud app hosting, so here goes:
Morph AppSpace is a paid hosting service with some cloudlike features - you can pay by the ‘cube’ or hosting unit - kinda like an Amazon EC2 Compute Unit - and it’s free to get started, which is nice for startups. They support Ruby, Rails, PHP, and Java (although I don’t know what kind of java hosting they provide, I’d assume it’s Tomcat-centric) and through the Java support, Grails if you’re into that kind of thing.
The cloudlike features are the ability to scale by adding new ‘cubes’ and the built-in monitoring that allow you make informed decisions on how much more money to spend on your scaling. It doesn’t dynamically scale, but it gives you the ability to add more resources to your app as you need them.
Like Google AppEngine (although, again, on Google’s side this is changing), you can’t run scheduled tasks, so you’ll have to work around this if you’re planning on hosting with Morph.
So there you go, one more tool for your belt.
