S’man advises that using a traditional hosting service to render web pages is passe. Not wanting to be eclipsed by new technology I followed his encouraging to advance. Aided by online postings, hints, and narratives one can learn the new jargon and implement the latest in cloud computing methods.

There are many solutions offerings. I discounted Google App Engine off the bat because their implementation is a bit arcane. Ditto the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Heroku was limited in their programing language offerings. AppFog looked promising with a generous CPU allotment but their console system behavior was discouraging. OpenShift by Red Hat however, seems like a winner with excellent documentation and performance. Beware: Most PaaS(s) rely on the Command Line Interface but as the concept matures; user friendly interfaces will develop.  App templates are currently provided for common setups but fine tuning requires knowledge of the command line.

A domain name is furnished with each app that you build on OpenShift. The domain that you are viewing currently is actually: wordpress-strombotne.rhcloud.com/ It is possible to use a CNAME record to point to that URL with one more personalized i.e. the sub-domain  blog.strombotne.com One uses their domain name registrar for this purpose and this is fine. However, a weakness that I’ve discovered is in using a naked domain, e.g. strombotne.com for an OpenShift app. Here’s where it becomes a bit wonky.  You can’t use CNAME with a domain name but typically use an A record resource with an IP number. The OpenShift DNS is limited as one isn’t provided. The fix is to try Domain Forwarding and Masking — a band-aid.