It would be nice if anyone had an option for deploying with mercurial. Purely anecdotal of course, but most of my PHP chums run hg as well. I know there's hg-git but for all the hassle it took to set up, I may as well have just used git itself.

(Incidentally, I was quite interested in this originally, but while waiting for an invite I ended up bodging together something on Amazon myself. Amusingly enough, my invites for phpfog, orchestra and dotcloud all came within 2 days of deploying!)

We have support for mercurial that we are in the process of test at the moment. When it's available, we'll announce on our blog: http://blog.orchestra.io/

If you'd tweeted us, we would have bumped you up the list :(

The site itself loads really slow. Makes a bad first impression for a platform service.

Thanks for the feedback. There are definitely front end performance tweaks we could make to improve the load time of our marketing site. Right now, however, the platform itself is our main area of attention :)

The site is taking over 5 seconds to load, and the signup page is down. Don't make excuses, that's not acceptable. You have to understand that we don't judge your service by looking at the code you write, we judge it by any means we can, which unfortunately includes whether your own site is accessible, design (yes), writing (your writing has quite a few spelling mistakes in it, no biggie but it helps if it hasn't), what others write about it etc.. All thoroughly unfair. Don't take it bad, but that's the way it works.

Then, AFTER we sign up (if we ever do), we can judge it by how well it works.

Good luck!

Thanks Peter. I don't feel I was making excuses, but communicating our immediate priorities.

The signup page seems fine, would you mind checking it again? I take your point on first impressions etc., well made.

Would you mind telling me where you've seen spelling mistakes, I'll correct them.

Thanks :)

The docs have lots of spelling mistakes, can't find any now though, but I noticed about 3 while glancing through them earlier. The signup page is up now.

Also, and I understand it's not a priority, the docs are a little wordy.

For example: "you will need to make sure you comply with the following requirements". Why not write: "You'll need these:". Much friendlier.

Or "In order to deploy an application on the Orchestra platform, one is required to login at https://my.orchestra.io/login. Once you've logged in, click on the Deploy A New App from your Dashboard. You will be taken to the Deployment interface where a few new terms might appear strange to you. Allow us to describe the fields you will see:".

You can replace that entire paragraph with this sentence: "To deploy an application, login at http://my.orchestra.io/login, and click Deploy A New App."

Another one: "Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering. Memcached is trivial to use and a very important part of any serious platform infrastructure. We are currently on an addon that will enable application deployers and Orchestra users to use Memcached. We will keep you updated with our progress."

Instead write: "Memcached support is coming soon". That has the same amount of informational value and is easier to read.

Just nitpicking on the writing now :) It does sound like a great product.

Really appreciate the feedback on the documentation, Peter. Docs are a type of UI, I guess, and the same rules should apply.

Consider them a work-in-progress! :)

doesn't the marketing site run on the platform? what about "eat your own dogfood?" :)

Of course it does. We eat our own dogfood, and it's damn tasty thanks :)

You'll note I specifically mentioned "front end performance tweaks"...

Well presented. It looks like it might hit the target audience very well, I'd say.