AppFog lands $8M for PHP PaaS | Hacker News Reader

AppFog lands $8M for PHP PaaS

gigaom.com

30 pointsjohns15 comments

Let me be cynical for a moment: name change means a search for the company name won't bring up quite as many results covering their security failures earlier this year.

If you read the article, they are planning to support Rails, Node.js, Python, etc. soon, so the name change reflects their goal to make it into something bigger. Also, I checked out the domain appfog.com and there is a huge PHP Fog button right there as one of their products, so it doesn't appear to be an attempt to cover anything up.

Great to see more Portland startups getting funding. I've been experimenting with their platform the past week or so. Title should mention it was formerly PHPFog.

We tried PHPFog, but ended up with pagodabox. If you are checking out cloud php platforms, give pagodabox a shot.

The ease of deployment and scaling on the fly is crazy simple, I could teach a 6 year old to scale our site up or down to meet demand.

Hadn't heard of pagodabox. I like the site design and the ability to easily deploy from an existing GitHub repository is nice. I requested an invite. Any idea who the developers are? Can't seem to find much info about them.

Thanks for sharing this, these guys look fantastic. A nice polished interface and decently priced.

Clickable: http://www.pagodabox.com/

Interesting that they are aiming a lot wider than PHP now, which is probably required to open up a market big enough to get that level of funding. Their PHP stuff is a big opportunity but I think it will be a lot harder to crack something like the ruby market with heroku.

I tried to work with PHPFog. Didn't come out as expected. I had trouble with their git workflow; you can't pull stuff from their servers. Interesting huh?

In any case the support was pretty good.

Push-only makes sense, git hosting as a service is a different business.

if AppFog plans to support Ruby and Python as well - its probably the road to nowhere .. , as there are plenty of competitors there,

they should rather focus on PHP clouds

Yes, but if they keep the competitive pricing they now have, they could make a big bang in Rails space.

Lucas was a leading developer at mog.com from the early days and more of a Ruby hacker at the time.

The industry is in a nascent state with respect to ruby and python clouds. Competition is always good.

A lot of the backend infrastructure can likely be reused, and by using javafog.com, rubyfog.com and so on, they can keep each brand/site independent without confusing end-users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com