AppFog lands $8M for PHP PaaS

[fomojola]

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.

[larrykubin]

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.

[larrykubin]

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.

[masonhensley]

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.

[robryan]

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.

[kuroir]

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.

[Kudos]

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

[eurohacker]

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

[ridruejo]

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.

[ivanbernat]

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

[ayanb]

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

[flocial]

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