Interesting Application To Quickly Put A WP Development Project On a Live Server

[Edwin]

I was looking into some options today to install WordPress locally and stumbled upon this software.

http://bitnami.org/stack/wampstack

And then after downloading it I was presented with this service which is now in Beta stage.

http://bitnami.org/bitnami_cloud_hosting

It looks like a great way to develop on locally and if you want to quickly demo something you can do so in a very short time frame, bypassing the need to install WordPress, create a database, upload theme files, etc

What do you guys think?

Is this already done? if so who does it?

For me this looks like a time saving solution.

Thoughts? :)

[Otto]

They also have this: http://bitnami.org/stack/wordpress

Clever. From what I can tell, they have two flavors of things. The complete stack with the software preinstalled, for quick standalone usage, or modular installers that work with their existing base stacks.

I don't know. I can certainly see it being a time saver for some, but I can set up a working stack in about 5 minutes flat anyway, so I'm not sure it would be useful for me. However, the virtual machine images could be very handy, if you already use VMWare or VirtualBox. I use a MacOSX VirtualBox install to test web sites on that platform (Sidenote: I hate Safari with the burning fire of a thousand suns).

The only real interesting thing I see here is that the modules and such exist to install the software directly into a cloud service, which is quite clever. The Amazon EC2 one, for example, installs a VMWare virtual machine, presumably tuned for EC2, and which runs a basic AMP service. I'm not certain how cost effective that would be, but the ability to move around your server and scale as needed is pretty clever. The GoGrid service is interesting as well.

In the long run, I've always wondered if cloud computing on virtual machines like this is really worth it. I can see the benefits of virtualization of servers, but it strikes me as probably more cost effective to farm this out to a data center instead of paying on an hourly basis for cloud services. Perhaps it's only effective on the smaller scale. Cloud services strike me as more effective at providing specific as-needed services, not for hosting virtual machines.