While the logo with all of the fantastical creatures may be reminiscent of the mythical Pandora's Box, the hosting provided by Pagoda Box is nothing to be scared of. It is actually a treat to use, and their tech support is top notch and fast to respond.

We just switched Bonfire's main site over to their hosting and I have found the experience to be a beautiful one. If you're used to working with git at all, you'll find it's a simple thing to deploy your site onto their hosting. Thanks to the multiple environment support built into CodeIgniter, you can setup your Bonfire sites so that both development and production have their appropriate settings for the database and any advanced caching that you would like to use. Commit the changes to git. Then a single command will push your site up to Pagoda's server and your site is live in a few seconds.

It's a very painless experience. And a pleasure to use.

There is only one thing to watch out for that I have run into, but it is easily fixed. Pagoda is a read only environment by default. This is a great security feature. However, you will typically want one or more directories to be writable to store user uploads, cache files, etc. you can do this by adding a Boxfile to your root folder. There are many things you can setup here, but by all we need to do for our Bonfire sites is to make a few folders writable. Your Boxfile would look something like:

web1:
  name: bonfire
  shared_writable_dirs:
    - bonfire/application/cache
    - bonfire/application/logs
    - assets/cache
    - bonfire/application/db/backups

Commit that file to your repo, push it live and you are good to go.

We are thrilled to be running on Pagoda now. Within the next two weeks we will be transferring the forums over to Pagoda as well.

If you need hosting for your Bonfire app, then Pagoda just maybe your simplest solution.