AppEngine is a "Platform as a Service" although they are re-phrasing it as "serverless" these days. It has benefits like you dont have to worry about the "roll your own" side of things - you just deploy your code and it runs (Google takes care of the servers - patches, security etc).

The "killer" feature of AppEngine is the scalability - i.e. your small-scale virtual or shared servers are ok for small usage, but what happens when you have more traffic than that VPS can handle? Perhaps call the hosting provider and ask for more CPU/Mem/Bandwidth, or maybe move to a new bigger server elsewhere. But that takes time, and what if it was just a spike and now your traffic is back to normal but you've got a beast of a server running the site. You could be wasting money even with the small VPS sitting idle for most of the day if you have very infrequent traffic.

With AppEngine it just scales automatically to handle the load, from zero QPS to many thousands QPS and back down to zero again without any effort from the developer apart from the initial config (... of course you can limit that scaling too if you want to control cost).

There are also a bunch of other nice-to-have features around traffic splitting (i.e. A/B testing), some nice task-handling tools (e.g. cron-style stuff, task queues), centralised logging, and the easy plug-ins to the other Google Cloud stuff.

Deployments themselves are not especially "quick" and you have to do a few things "the appengine way", but the trade-off is you have nothing to manage on the server at all.

I've used AppEngine a lot over the past few years (mainly Java and Go) and its pretty decent I've found, although I do use a lot of the other Google Cloud services (e.g. their database stuff) so it makes sense. App Engine has been pretty rock solid in my experience.

I'll add that the "free tier" makes it a great place to host hobby apps that get little traffic without paying a monthly fee. They are very stable; I've only had to upgrade every five years or so.

Good run down what GAE offers. The point I'd like to add and emphasise on is zero downtime deploys.

Thank you very much for your response here, fellow LDNer - it's illuminated a domain I had completely overlooked for years!

What specific problem are you're not sure how to solve the right way ?

Compared to some other language a proper PHP env is relatively dumb to set up, have a build script in your system of choice to install fcgi PHP in the version you need and the extensions you expect and setup the relatively simple conf file in your browser of choice, and then have a composer file to setup the libraries you need, tada you're pretty much down (everything else is not very much PHP specific)

Thank you for all your responses here - I am red-faced with shame to realise I'd for years completely ignored exactly what containers are and associated terms such as 'Heroku' or 'Kubernetes' I'd simply assumed they were curious alien creatures, completely irrelevant to me!

After a long journey down various rabbit holes last night, where I at points got quite excited by the idea of leveraging Heroku with perhaps a soupçon of Cloudflare in the background or AWS' myriad of services, I ended up back where I've always been, and think I'll stick with what I know for my upcoming project.

However, I think this'd be a great way to dabble in things I really don't have any famiiarity with (eg. Ruby), so I'll have a play yet.

Thanks, all!

Laravel Forge [1] offers what you're after though I'm not entirely sure it's worth the added cost imo.

[1] https://forge.laravel.com/features

Forge is a laravel only platform and doesn't scale automatically. It is more useful for maintaining a standard deployment process for your laravel application. It made setting up queues / redis / mongo a breeze when we onboarded new employees.

> Forge is a laravel only platform

That's incorrect. The page says: "We don’t discriminate: Laravel, Symfony, WordPress, Statamic, Craft and any other PHP application can easily be installed on a Forge server."

> doesn't scale automatically

That's true but I the person to whom I was responding isn't looking for auto-scaling (nor am I presenting it as a GAE competitor). It sounds like he just wants a button to push that'll create a fully operational PHP app server.

If you wanted say wordpress cpanel hosting will provide a one click button, auto update plus allow you install most popular php software packages easily.

Paying 10 or more dollars a month probably doesn't make a lot of sense unless you are installing laravel and for some reason can't do it yourself.. Or if you need to replicate the process. It is not really one button click either you need to find/create the right script(s) if you are doing anything complex and if you are not just have the developers get a copy of the app from github and clone a dev box on digitalocean.

Non Google alternatives are for example AWS Elastic Beanstalk or Heroku.

There's always Heroku too.