PHP Fog Raises $1.8 Million To Be The Heroku Of PHP

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/10/php-fog-raises-1-8-million-to-be-the-heroku-of-php/

by ggordan • 16 years ago

41 38 16 years ago

gexla4• 16 years ago

Anyone else tired of hearing about "the Heroku of x?" However, you can be pretty sure you hit the right combo of good timing and implementation when your own startup is followed by services which are referred to as "[insert your startup name] of x."

ETA: Let's have some fun and play with the tagline they have on their pricing page which is "Like Heroku, but better."

Like Heroku, but without ninjas and rockstars.

Like Heroku, but better, but less cool.

aresant2• 16 years ago

Tired or not it's not a bad way to make value proposition clear and in hindsight is pretty handy:

- "Youtube is the flickr of Video" - http://slashdot.org/articles/05/08/14/1320217.shtml

- "AdMob is the doubleclick of mobile" http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/200...

etc

gexla4• 16 years ago

Sure, but wouldn't it be better if you could make that proposition from your own presentation without having to refer to other services? If PHPFog is the Heroku of PHP, then what was Heroku the Heroku of? ;)

steveklabnik3• 16 years ago

I agree when a company's mission seems simple, it might be overkill. But this kind of analogy was the only way of getting people to reasonably understand what my first startup did. "We're the EC2 of manufacturing."

nl• 16 years ago

Imagine explaining it from first principles:

Q: "Please explain what your application does, without comparing it to anything"

A: "It's the Heroku of PHP".. No!

A: "It's like EC2, but preconfigured for PHP with less control".. No!

A: "It's like shared web hosting, but with better performance characteristics and somewhat more control".. No!

.....

A: "You get a server on the internet, where you can install PHP stuff. Except you don't actually have a server, and it is preconfigured to automatically scale your app across virtual machines. It comes with a set of tools and scripts to make installing stuff easy, and you don't need to administer it. By letting us concentrate on system admin and scaling it gives you more time to concentrate on building your application."

Q: "Oh, you mean like Heroku, except for PHP?"

A: "FUUUUUUUUUUUU"

Timzzz• 16 years ago

nice work!I hope to use it when I can get an account. I just hope it is as easy as they say.

tmcw• 16 years ago

Don't really get this one. First off, PHP doesn't have the deploy/run process of Sinatra/Ruby/Node/etc. Second, 1.8 mil isn't much money; that's probably the amount you could bootstrap with some past success. And the business-plan-like graphic doesn't reveal that there's anything interesting in their tech approach than any commodity hosting.

chanrises• 16 years ago

I am also confused. What are the benefits of phpfog if it normally only takes 15 min to create a linux server with php/mysql on amazon ec2? The only things I could see different are db slave replication and http caching, but generally those you don't worry till much later, and are not critical.

aheilbut• 16 years ago

Does it really take that much time to create a linux server with rails on EC2?

Energy barriers seem to matter.

mikey_p2• 16 years ago

I think most of the people that could do that for the LAMP stack could probably get through setting up a Ruby or node server without too much extra time. Also, once you're done it, how hard is it do repeat? Yet I don't see folks making these same arguments against Heroku. One of the key points I got from talking to Lucas is that he's focusing not just on scalability, but HA, which is something that while not hard to do for the LAMP stack, isn't trivial either (usually it's just a matter of time spent setting it up).

The other neat (or annoying step) is that PHPFog goes the git route for handling your code. Just signing up and creating a site puts a default codebase for the platform you've selected into your git repo, and you just check it out, and commit to get started.

gexla4• 16 years ago

With Phusion Passenger, a Ruby environment is just as easy to setup these days as PHP. Back when Heroku first started, I don't think Phusion Passenger existed.

However, the point of these services isn't necessarily to save the developer from having to setup these environments, but rather it's to save the developer from worrying about having to setup a solid, scalable production setup. You still should have a development setup which lives somewhere other than Heroku.

loganlinn• 16 years ago

From http://www.phpfog.com/pricing: "We will provide simple one-click installations of some of the most popular PHP applications out there."

I'd say that taking a 'Heroku clone' approach might work against them.

Their biggest feature may be the ability to easily install and deploy pre-existing PHP products like Joomla, Drupal, vBulletin, etc.

People that use these commercial PHP projects are likely to appreciate such a service for many reasons. In a way, they are capturing a lot of the value that cPanel offers.

alanstorm3• 16 years ago

If you haven't been paying much attention to EC2 until now, getting your head around the pricing structure, what plan makes sense, and the whole "You have a VM but no permanent disk" thing can take some time. PHPFog's value proposition would seem to be "We've figured out EC2 for you, and have default VMs setup for Drupal and Wordpress and a way to deal with those system's need for permanent disk space. If you can get your code in a git repository we'll handle the rest." Just getting Drupal and Wordpress out of a shared hosting environment is a huge win security/stability wise, and if their VMs have a configuration that deals with a lot of the well known attack vectors that aren't shared host related all the better.

I'm not sure that I'd use it myself, because I'd like to spend to time to get familiar with EC2, but with shared hosting becoming a less reliable solution as internet traffic patterns change (and shared hosts increasingly go he commodity route) there's going to be a lot of PHP professionals (and PHP hacks, and non-programmer hacks using PHP systems) looking for a turn-key cloud solution, so I can see the interest in PHPFog.

TL;DR: There's large swaths of the PHP community that doesn't know how to make EC2 work, PHPFog is aiming to be their middleman.

noodle4• 16 years ago

phpfog right now is offering the "don't worry about until much later" benefits as their main selling point, which is the reason why i'm not currently using them, but they have promise if they can bring their concept/model down to smaller apps

steveklabnik3• 16 years ago

By now, you deploy Ruby applications in the same way you deploy PHP applications, for the most part. We've come a long way since a few years ago. An Apache + passenger setup looks basically the same as Apache + mod_php.

Here's the secret sauce of Heroku: I know how to set up servers. I don't want to.

Paying for convenience is always a good business model.

chanri• 16 years ago

Just wondering, how much control do you have over configuration settings for Heroku?

I imagine you could save a lot of money by optimizing apache/mysql rather than using the default configuration Heroku sets.

mikey_p2• 16 years ago

>Here's the secret sauce of Heroku: I know how to set up servers. I don't want to. >Paying for convenience is always a good business model.

This.

I really wish that the Pantheon folks would scale up and open up their platform to generic PHP apps. It's everything I want setup and ready to go: Varnish, Apache, MariaDB, PHP5 APC, Memcached, Solr, Hudson all on one box, configured for dev, staging and prod environments, and managed via git and Hudson for deployments and automation.

https://getpantheon.com/about

Edit: Forgot to add that the best part about the Pantheon service is that while you can use it as a total SaaS like Heroku, it's also 100% hackable, you have root on the box, and can change anything that you want to, quite an amazing idea (have to see how their support issues pan out).

noodle4• 16 years ago

i like the idea but i dislike the execution of it (so far, having tried it).

it isn't as complex to deal with a php app, but it can be stressful to play server admin on an app that gets to be popular. simply not having to worry about setting up a server, optimizing it, scaling it, backing it up, etc. is just nice.

dylanz• 16 years ago

Congrats Lucas!

cardmagic3• 16 years ago

Thank you!

encoderer• 16 years ago

Like the service, hate the name. Though I personally would like it better if it included plug-and-play framework too. (Heroku has Rails, for example)

pstinnett• 16 years ago

Why is Shopify listed under the apps? I always thought Shopify was a hosted rails app.

cardmagic3• 16 years ago

http://blog.shopify.com/2010/6/18/official-php-adapter-for-s...

noodle4• 16 years ago

i hope the funding will allow you to create a free plan, like heroku. i like the idea of whats provided. i don't like the pricing structure.

cardmagic3• 16 years ago

We are working on some features I think you will be excited about!

noodle4• 16 years ago

i hope so. been following progress since you guys announced it (here? i don't recall). i'd like to see it fit my needs, but it doesn't yet.

cmelbye• 16 years ago

The future is heterogeneous Platform as a Service (for example, http://dotcloud.com/) in my opinion. I can't imagine going back to Heroku where I can only host Ruby along with a selection externally hosted add-ons.

PHP Fog Raises $1.8 Million To Be The Heroku Of PHP

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