5 ms·

Phusion Passenger Enterprise released

52 points by ninh 14y ago

Or go directly to https://www.phusionpassenger.com ! Excited to hear what you guys think about it.

NoPiece 14y ago
You might consider bundling the enterprise version with union station. A startup version with a 2 server license and union station monitoring for both would be nice. You could also offer access to the union station beta for anyone who buys enterprise now.
tinco 14y ago
If you think blog posts are boring you can skip to our awesome launch page here: https://phusionpassenger.com https://phusionpassenger.com We're excited to hear what you think about it.
- bradleyland 14y ago
  I really wish I had something more constructive to say, but I just want to tell you guys that I really appreciate the product you've developed and the philosophy behind it. I've tried a lot of other app servers, and while there are a lot of great products out there, I didn't find any of them to match the ease of installation, configuration, and stability that Passenger provides. I'm looking forward to being a paying customer. Congrats!
- asg 14y ago
  In general very nicely done, but the $4999 option with every detail negotiable seems a bit amateurish. "Lets throw a number and see what sticks" Having said that, the intention is, I imagine, noble. You want to be, and be seen, to be flexible and willing to work with your customer. But I think the way its presented will come across as wishy-washy. I like the design, thought it may be a little busy at times. But certainly eye catching.
  - Ruphin 14y ago
    The Deluxe option is there to indicate that we have special offerings for large volume customers. If your yearly license fee would surpass the $4999 mark, feel free to contact us and negotiate a different set of license terms.
  - ninh 14y ago
    edit We've changed it to "custom" pricing for now, and will work on an updated pricing table to better reflect our intention of having an SLA included. Thanks again! Apologies for the "amateurish" impression, it was actually meant to be a plan that would include the entry level SLA with guaranteed response times. After reading some of the feedback here, it's definitely something we're aiming to fix in the next update. Thank you for your feedback! :)
  - backwardm 14y ago
    In my humble opinion, the design work is incredible. Not at all busy—clean, professional looking and well made.
JonAtkinson 14y ago
The first line of this post mentions: "Phusion Passenger is an Apache and Nginx module for deploying Ruby and Python web applications." ... yet I can't see any further mention of Python support in any of the linked roadmap posts, or on https://www.phusionpassenger.com/enterprise https://www.phusionpassenger.com/enterprise - does anyone have any more information about Python support?
- tinco 14y ago
  We've supported Python for quite a long time, we made a bit more public here: http://blog.phusion.nl/2012/04/13/a-sneak-preview-of-phusion-passenger-3-2/ http://blog.phusion.nl/2012/04/13/a-sneak-preview-of-phusion... Basically you can just drop in a WSGI python app, and we will serve it up :)
- FooBarWidget 14y ago
  Python support is in beta. We've actually already supported Python since 1.0, and it pretty much worked, but it remained an experiment and felt a little unpolished. Today, we've officially elevated it to "beta" status, meaning that it isn't terribly well documented yet, and may not feel as polished as Ruby support, but generally works well. We will publish blog articles and documentation about Python support in the near future. If you would like to stay up to date, please subscribe to our newsletter at http://eepurl.com/nXXrL http://eepurl.com/nXXrL In a nutshell, you put your WSGI application code in passenger_wsgi.py. Point the virtual host's document root to the 'public' directory, and it just works. Very similar to Rack/Rails support, with passenger_wsgi.py substituting config.ru. See this for an example of Django on Phusion Passenger: https://github.com/kwe/passenger-django-wsgi-example/ https://github.com/kwe/passenger-django-wsgi-example/
- sciurus 14y ago
  When I looked at this around a year ago, there was surprisingly little code involved with supporting Python/WSGI. I was interested in adding support for Perl/PSGI; I decided that would take me longer than I had free time to commit, but for someone with more knowledge it might be a quick project and a real boon for running Perl web applications on shared hosting.
jolan 14y ago
Why doesn't my old license transfer? /sarcasm http://www.modrails.com/enterprise.html http://www.modrails.com/enterprise.html Should probably remove this page since they share the same name and all.
- thibaut_barrere 14y ago
  (I'm a first batch donor) in my understanding, we donated to support the development, but never bought a license (unless I'm mistaken?)
  - IbJacked 14y ago
    Yep, it was a license purchase, sorta (I was in batch 2). From their website at the time: "you’ll be able to purchase the limited version of Phusion Passenger Enterprise Edition for the price that you think that it’s worth. Get it while supplies last." Followed by a big green button saying "BUY ENTERPRISE LICENSE TODAY". BUT, right below that it said: Actually this is really a donation. The "enterprise" name is just a joke. Wayback Machine Link: http://web.archive.org/web/20081210192914/http://www.modrails.com/enterprise.html http://web.archive.org/web/20081210192914/http://www.modrail... edit: removed some asterisks that were causing a display issue.
- FooBarWidget 14y ago
  In the past we had a donation campaign where users can donate arbitrary amounts of money to us. We called it an "enterprise license" as a joke - the "enterprise license" just gave you a fancy logo with the word "enterprise" in it. Phusion Passenger Enterprise is no longer a joke. It is now a real product with real features. A while ago we started "de-joking" the old donation page. As you can see at, the page now explicitly mentions that it's a donation. The 'enterprise.html' URL is kept to prevent links from breaking, but we may change that as well in the future to reduce confusion. That said, we're grateful to all the people who have donated and supported us. Our Startup license type is our way to support other startups.
  - equalarrow 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- FooBarWidget 14y ago
  Yes it's running on Phusion Passenger Enterprise, we eat our dogfood. We were getting so much traffic that the server ran out of memory and swap. I tweaked some settings and it's ok now.
  - dedene 14y ago
    Awesome, I just bought a license. One question, one license is limited to two machines simultanuously... Is the usage in development (on a localhost) also counted against this limit?
    - FooBarWidget 14y ago
      Yes. We have however already received requests for workstation licensing terms. We will discuss this internally and see whether there's a better way to accomodate people who use Phusion Passenger Enterprise in development.
      - cmelbye 14y ago
        Wait, so the machine count isn't through the honor system? You truly won't be able to run another instance of the server if you have one production and one development server going?
        ninh 14y ago
        We protect through our license, not through engineering. There is no copy protection implemented in Phusion Passenger Enterprise, so technically speaking, we can't stop you. Instead, we trust that our users won't abuse this fact.
swalberg 14y ago
That deluxe version looks really out of place, almost as if it were thrown in there to make the pro version look good without thinking of the people that would be interested in something above pro. When I put in my third server, do I have to buy the deluxe version (which takes my annual costs from $200 to $5000)? Or do I buy up to 25 of the pro licences to get up to 50 servers? You may also want to consider making your commercial support offerings mesh with the enterprise licensing. As an example I seem to have to negotiate phone support and at best a 6 hour response time with the enterprise licencing or get an EUR 15K support contract to get 2 hours.
- Ruphin 14y ago
  You can purchase as many Pro licenses as you wish, each license granting the use of Phusion Passenger Enterprise on 2 distinct servers. If your total license fee rises above $5000, feel free to contact us for a more tailored license. The commercial support offering is available primarily for demanding enterprises who require high support levels for software to be incorporated into their stack. The level of support from these licenses is beyond what is expected for normal product support, including consultancy time with our deployment experts.
- ninh 14y ago
  edit We've changed it to "custom" pricing for now, and will work on an updated pricing table to better reflect our intention of having an SLA included among other things. Thanks again! :) Re: the deluxe version. Hmm, that wasn't our intention, we merely wanted to include a plan that had the entry level SLA pricing attached to it for support with guaranteed response-times. Apologies if it wasn't clear enough, but we'll be sure to fix this in a future site update. Re: third server, if you're a startup, you'd end up buying 2 startup licenses. If you're not a startup, that'd be 2 pro licenses (or as you mentioned, buy 25 pro licenses to get up to 50 servers). Hope that clears things up a bit, it definitely is good to get constructive feedback like this so we can try and fix it. Much thanks! :)
wheaties 14y ago
As feedback I wish I could say to them this: "Everything looked great until I saw yourselves calling each other Ninjas. Chief Executive Ninja!? Bye." At this point I might just be a bit jaded but the term ninja is about as flattering to me as peewee. It's not that I haven't worked with "ninjas" before and from that experience I've grown a very clear aversion to "ninja" anything. Add to that recruiters have picked up on the term and now everyone has to be a "ninja" to get the job. Really? Ugh. Get rid of "ninja." Then I'll actually be able to point my boss to your website.
- ninh 14y ago
  Re: 'Get rid of "ninja"' Done. Please consider pointing your boss to our website ;-) Thanks for the feedback, phusion.nl definitely needs a facelift and we're working on that, too :)
  - batista 14y ago
    In the "Nedap story": "With activities branching into healthcare as well, it is important for their systems to be available at all times." I think you can afford to lose the "as well".
    - ninh 14y ago
      Agreed, updated and should be visible in the next rolled restart ;-) Thanks!
davidw 14y ago
How is this going to interact with the open source version, going forward?
- FooBarWidget 14y ago
  We will continue to develop the open source version. All changes in the open source version will end up in Enterprise, but Enterprise will have more features. We intend on making a living out of this so by buying Enterprise you will directly sponsor development of the open source version.
  - mlitwiniuk 14y ago
    Maybe you could create some kind of comparission table? Because it take some time now to understand what for I'm supposed to be paying for (and as long as passenger runs on few of my servers, it would be my pleasure to thank you for passenger by buying a license).
    - ninh 14y ago
      Aaah, we initially considered stacking the open source version against the enterprise version in a comparison table, but due to some previously made design choices, were unable to fit the column properly in time! Instead, we opted to drop that column in favor of being able to launch today and potentially fix in a future update. Considering the feedback from this thread, it definitely looks like something we need to fit back in and will be among the things we'll work on for the next iteration/deploy. Thanks for the feedback and kind words, it's much appreciated seeing as we've been working on this for a while now; it easily becomes hard to look at things with a fresh pair of eyes after a while, which is definitely needed for giving a good first impression imo.
      - chuyeow 14y ago
        Hongli, Ninh, I've always loved Passenger (it's running almost all of my Rails apps) and am happy to see you guys try to get paid directly for all the effort that went into Passenger. I just wanted to add my voice that I think it'll be useful for developers to know what you guys intend to do with the open source version now that you've the Enterprise version. A comparison table like mlitwiniuk mentioned would be useful. Would also like to know when the open source version of Passenger 4.0 will be available so I can decide whether to pay for a few Enterprise licenses now or hold on.

52 points by ninh 14y ago

Or go directly to https://www.phusionpassenger.com ! Excited to hear what you guys think about it.

You might consider bundling the enterprise version with union station. A startup version with a 2 server license and union station monitoring for both would be nice. You could also offer access to the union station beta for anyone who buys enterprise now.

tinco 14y ago

If you think blog posts are boring you can skip to our awesome launch page here: https://phusionpassenger.com https://phusionpassenger.com We're excited to hear what you think about it.

bradleyland 14y ago
I really wish I had something more constructive to say, but I just want to tell you guys that I really appreciate the product you've developed and the philosophy behind it. I've tried a lot of other app servers, and while there are a lot of great products out there, I didn't find any of them to match the ease of installation, configuration, and stability that Passenger provides. I'm looking forward to being a paying customer. Congrats!
asg 14y ago
In general very nicely done, but the $4999 option with every detail negotiable seems a bit amateurish. "Lets throw a number and see what sticks" Having said that, the intention is, I imagine, noble. You want to be, and be seen, to be flexible and willing to work with your customer. But I think the way its presented will come across as wishy-washy. I like the design, thought it may be a little busy at times. But certainly eye catching.
- Ruphin 14y ago
  The Deluxe option is there to indicate that we have special offerings for large volume customers. If your yearly license fee would surpass the $4999 mark, feel free to contact us and negotiate a different set of license terms.
- ninh 14y ago
  edit We've changed it to "custom" pricing for now, and will work on an updated pricing table to better reflect our intention of having an SLA included. Thanks again! Apologies for the "amateurish" impression, it was actually meant to be a plan that would include the entry level SLA with guaranteed response times. After reading some of the feedback here, it's definitely something we're aiming to fix in the next update. Thank you for your feedback! :)
- backwardm 14y ago
  In my humble opinion, the design work is incredible. Not at all busy—clean, professional looking and well made.

JonAtkinson 14y ago

The first line of this post mentions: "Phusion Passenger is an Apache and Nginx module for deploying Ruby and Python web applications." ... yet I can't see any further mention of Python support in any of the linked roadmap posts, or on https://www.phusionpassenger.com/enterprise https://www.phusionpassenger.com/enterprise - does anyone have any more information about Python support?

tinco 14y ago
We've supported Python for quite a long time, we made a bit more public here: http://blog.phusion.nl/2012/04/13/a-sneak-preview-of-phusion-passenger-3-2/ http://blog.phusion.nl/2012/04/13/a-sneak-preview-of-phusion... Basically you can just drop in a WSGI python app, and we will serve it up :)
FooBarWidget 14y ago
Python support is in beta. We've actually already supported Python since 1.0, and it pretty much worked, but it remained an experiment and felt a little unpolished. Today, we've officially elevated it to "beta" status, meaning that it isn't terribly well documented yet, and may not feel as polished as Ruby support, but generally works well. We will publish blog articles and documentation about Python support in the near future. If you would like to stay up to date, please subscribe to our newsletter at http://eepurl.com/nXXrL http://eepurl.com/nXXrL In a nutshell, you put your WSGI application code in passenger_wsgi.py. Point the virtual host's document root to the 'public' directory, and it just works. Very similar to Rack/Rails support, with passenger_wsgi.py substituting config.ru. See this for an example of Django on Phusion Passenger: https://github.com/kwe/passenger-django-wsgi-example/ https://github.com/kwe/passenger-django-wsgi-example/
sciurus 14y ago
When I looked at this around a year ago, there was surprisingly little code involved with supporting Python/WSGI. I was interested in adding support for Perl/PSGI; I decided that would take me longer than I had free time to commit, but for someone with more knowledge it might be a quick project and a real boon for running Perl web applications on shared hosting.

jolan 14y ago

Why doesn't my old license transfer? /sarcasm http://www.modrails.com/enterprise.html http://www.modrails.com/enterprise.html Should probably remove this page since they share the same name and all.

thibaut_barrere 14y ago
(I'm a first batch donor) in my understanding, we donated to support the development, but never bought a license (unless I'm mistaken?)
- IbJacked 14y ago
  Yep, it was a license purchase, sorta (I was in batch 2). From their website at the time: "you’ll be able to purchase the limited version of Phusion Passenger Enterprise Edition for the price that you think that it’s worth. Get it while supplies last." Followed by a big green button saying "BUY ENTERPRISE LICENSE TODAY". BUT, right below that it said: Actually this is really a donation. The "enterprise" name is just a joke. Wayback Machine Link: http://web.archive.org/web/20081210192914/http://www.modrails.com/enterprise.html http://web.archive.org/web/20081210192914/http://www.modrail... edit: removed some asterisks that were causing a display issue.
FooBarWidget 14y ago
In the past we had a donation campaign where users can donate arbitrary amounts of money to us. We called it an "enterprise license" as a joke - the "enterprise license" just gave you a fancy logo with the word "enterprise" in it. Phusion Passenger Enterprise is no longer a joke. It is now a real product with real features. A while ago we started "de-joking" the old donation page. As you can see at, the page now explicitly mentions that it's a donation. The 'enterprise.html' URL is kept to prevent links from breaking, but we may change that as well in the future to reduce confusion. That said, we're grateful to all the people who have donated and supported us. Our Startup license type is our way to support other startups.
- equalarrow 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

FooBarWidget 14y ago
Yes it's running on Phusion Passenger Enterprise, we eat our dogfood. We were getting so much traffic that the server ran out of memory and swap. I tweaked some settings and it's ok now.
- dedene 14y ago
  Awesome, I just bought a license. One question, one license is limited to two machines simultanuously... Is the usage in development (on a localhost) also counted against this limit?
  - FooBarWidget 14y ago
    Yes. We have however already received requests for workstation licensing terms. We will discuss this internally and see whether there's a better way to accomodate people who use Phusion Passenger Enterprise in development.
    - cmelbye 14y ago
      Wait, so the machine count isn't through the honor system? You truly won't be able to run another instance of the server if you have one production and one development server going?
      - ninh 14y ago
        We protect through our license, not through engineering. There is no copy protection implemented in Phusion Passenger Enterprise, so technically speaking, we can't stop you. Instead, we trust that our users won't abuse this fact.

swalberg 14y ago

That deluxe version looks really out of place, almost as if it were thrown in there to make the pro version look good without thinking of the people that would be interested in something above pro. When I put in my third server, do I have to buy the deluxe version (which takes my annual costs from $200 to $5000)? Or do I buy up to 25 of the pro licences to get up to 50 servers? You may also want to consider making your commercial support offerings mesh with the enterprise licensing. As an example I seem to have to negotiate phone support and at best a 6 hour response time with the enterprise licencing or get an EUR 15K support contract to get 2 hours.

Ruphin 14y ago
You can purchase as many Pro licenses as you wish, each license granting the use of Phusion Passenger Enterprise on 2 distinct servers. If your total license fee rises above $5000, feel free to contact us for a more tailored license. The commercial support offering is available primarily for demanding enterprises who require high support levels for software to be incorporated into their stack. The level of support from these licenses is beyond what is expected for normal product support, including consultancy time with our deployment experts.
ninh 14y ago
edit We've changed it to "custom" pricing for now, and will work on an updated pricing table to better reflect our intention of having an SLA included among other things. Thanks again! :) Re: the deluxe version. Hmm, that wasn't our intention, we merely wanted to include a plan that had the entry level SLA pricing attached to it for support with guaranteed response-times. Apologies if it wasn't clear enough, but we'll be sure to fix this in a future site update. Re: third server, if you're a startup, you'd end up buying 2 startup licenses. If you're not a startup, that'd be 2 pro licenses (or as you mentioned, buy 25 pro licenses to get up to 50 servers). Hope that clears things up a bit, it definitely is good to get constructive feedback like this so we can try and fix it. Much thanks! :)

wheaties 14y ago

As feedback I wish I could say to them this: "Everything looked great until I saw yourselves calling each other Ninjas. Chief Executive Ninja!? Bye." At this point I might just be a bit jaded but the term ninja is about as flattering to me as peewee. It's not that I haven't worked with "ninjas" before and from that experience I've grown a very clear aversion to "ninja" anything. Add to that recruiters have picked up on the term and now everyone has to be a "ninja" to get the job. Really? Ugh. Get rid of "ninja." Then I'll actually be able to point my boss to your website.

ninh 14y ago
Re: 'Get rid of "ninja"' Done. Please consider pointing your boss to our website ;-) Thanks for the feedback, phusion.nl definitely needs a facelift and we're working on that, too :)
- batista 14y ago
  In the "Nedap story": "With activities branching into healthcare as well, it is important for their systems to be available at all times." I think you can afford to lose the "as well".
  - ninh 14y ago
    Agreed, updated and should be visible in the next rolled restart ;-) Thanks!

davidw 14y ago

How is this going to interact with the open source version, going forward?

FooBarWidget 14y ago
We will continue to develop the open source version. All changes in the open source version will end up in Enterprise, but Enterprise will have more features. We intend on making a living out of this so by buying Enterprise you will directly sponsor development of the open source version.
- mlitwiniuk 14y ago
  Maybe you could create some kind of comparission table? Because it take some time now to understand what for I'm supposed to be paying for (and as long as passenger runs on few of my servers, it would be my pleasure to thank you for passenger by buying a license).
  - ninh 14y ago
    Aaah, we initially considered stacking the open source version against the enterprise version in a comparison table, but due to some previously made design choices, were unable to fit the column properly in time! Instead, we opted to drop that column in favor of being able to launch today and potentially fix in a future update. Considering the feedback from this thread, it definitely looks like something we need to fit back in and will be among the things we'll work on for the next iteration/deploy. Thanks for the feedback and kind words, it's much appreciated seeing as we've been working on this for a while now; it easily becomes hard to look at things with a fresh pair of eyes after a while, which is definitely needed for giving a good first impression imo.
    - chuyeow 14y ago
      Hongli, Ninh, I've always loved Passenger (it's running almost all of my Rails apps) and am happy to see you guys try to get paid directly for all the effort that went into Passenger. I just wanted to add my voice that I think it'll be useful for developers to know what you guys intend to do with the open source version now that you've the Enterprise version. A comparison table like mlitwiniuk mentioned would be useful. Would also like to know when the open source version of Passenger 4.0 will be available so I can decide whether to pay for a few Enterprise licenses now or hold on.