The company is still in a closed beta and is accepting applicants for its waiting list. The cloud-based platform helps PHP developers deploy and scale their web apps, a lot like what Heroku does for Ruby apps and developers.
"PHP Fog provides simple one-click installations of some of the most popular PHP applications out there... You get full access to the source code of your PHP application through git. Push your code changes to us, and we will publish these changes to the cloud.
"We handle deployment, failover, database maintenance, scaling, and all the other plumbing that can take an army of programmers and systems administrators to handle. Automatically. You pay only for what you use."
As you'll recall, Heroku was recently acquired by Salesforce for the staggering price of $212 million. As we predicted a month ago, this was likely to be a big signal to investors that developer-oriented products and services were worthy investments.
Especially when one considers the relatives sizes of the PHP and Ruby communities, an investment in a PHP PaaS in the wake of a Ruby PaaS's acquisition makes perfect sense.
But enough about Heroku. Portland-based PHP Fog founder Lucas Carlson said in an e-mail that the idea for his company started when he was "hacking around with some code seeing if I could create something useful for my PHP programmer friends.
"I got a prototype working to prove that it’s possible. Then I put a landing page up that described the promise of PHP Fog. A single link on Hacker News went up the next day and 800 people signed up for what I built. That was the day I knew I had to go all in."
PHP Fog gives developers dedicated (as opposed to shared) resources for their apps. Its N-tier horizontal scaling purports to give apps reliability and scalability, allowing for independent growth of web and database layers, which will likely come in particularly handy for early-stage projects and companies.