Kind of funny to have this making front page while the "Don't be a free user" link (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3320931) is the top story. What is the business model here?
The business model is that free is on a shared and limited infrastructure so our costs are low. We also limit the number and resources for free. We have found that we had some room to offer even more without cutting into our margins significantly which is what drives this decision.
Company blogs that have the company logo linked back to the blog rather than the company.
PHPFog people, do a quick test: from this blog entry, what can you click that gets you to phpfog.com so that the potential new user you've lured to your world can find out more about your thing and potentially become a customer?
- Your logo? No. Goes to the blog
- Anything on the sidebar? No. Also blog stuff
- Your logo in the footer? No. Not even a link
- ANYTHING in the footer? No.
- ANYTHING on the page??? *At All???* No.
So what can we click? Personally, I clicked the back button. Your thing might be interesting enough to give a few seconds of attention, but I'm not about to go typing things in the URL bar just to figure out what it does.
Even more confusing... Go to AppFog (who they renamed to, but seem to still be furthering PHPFog) and click on "Blog" and it goes to the PHPFog blog... but there actually is an AppFog blog, just nothing links to it.
Interesting. I got the contrary impression: that from top to bottom this looks like a serious company that's going for a sustainable freemium business model, with no intention of flipping. I mean, this isn't a consumer-facing mobile-social-photo-check-in app. It's a platform for developers that has a pretty clear selection of tiered products that includes an introduction tier that's free, for development and testing on shared domain and servers. And they seem to have a pretty clear focus on their customer: developers.
Joe hit it right on the nail here. We examined our costs very carefully and found some room to give back to our community.
The right blend that we were going for was give enough to do dev/test for free, and be reasonably priced (https://phpfog.com/pricing) when you are ready for production.
When Linode gives away more RAM or AWS makes inbound traffic free, it is not a sign these companies are less trustworthy, but that they love their users. We love developers and are trying to do right by them.
Just wanted to say thank you for doing this. It was a rather fortuitous coincidence because I'm starting on a Drupal project and was evaluating hosting options to use for development. I am exactly the demographic you mentioned: use for dev, with a strong consideration of upgrading for production.
Me, too. I'd much rather see a company with near-zero marginal costs spend money on a free tier than on sales people and marketing programs. It's so much more revealing to actually use a service than listen to a salesperson or trial a service for 30 days.
Why didn't they link to it? It definitely sounded too good to be true.
Now that I found the pricing, my impression is: "OK they are trying to get more people on their platform so that once their sites get popular they will upgrade to paid plans." That seems more reasonable, but is not mentioned in the somewhat sleazy-sounding blog post.
Perhaps sleazy was too strong a word ... it just seemed "cheap". When someone offers you something for free, the first question is -- what's the catch?
I don't think their catch is bad at all -- it's standard platform marketing to offer a free trial. But at least link to your pricing. Say what the limitations are of the free version and what you get for paying. It should be easy but instead it left me wondering and it took several clicks to find what it was all about.
Wow, looks like the race to be the PHP PaaS king just got a little hotter. It sounds like PHPFog may be responding to some competitive pressure. Orchestra.io has been offering 2 free apps per account for a while now, and as far as I know, Pagoda Box has offered free-forever apps since they've been around. The free apps are only limited only by resources. Customers can have as many free apps as they like as long as they don't scale beyond the free resources.
This is an interesting move, but not totally unexpected. It'll be interesting to see how the next couple of months play out.
I've been running a good-traffic site on PHPFog for about 6 months on the $29 plan. The product has some issues but, overall, I'm quite fond of it, the site speed, newrelic monitoring that they bundle in, and responsiveness of support.
Here are a few subtleties you may uncover. These may or may not be deal-breakers for you - they weren't for me (at least, yet):
1) No control over client-side caching policies via .htaccess. Though, I've heard it's in the works.
2) $5 subdomains seem highly priced. I would be using them if not for that.
3) No SLA (i.e. availability) which makes me a bit jittery.
4) Documentation is murky on MySQL resource usage limits (other than disk space).
5) Flashy error pages from PHPFog when/if the service is down make no secret about where the site is hosted and instance status. Some discretion is probably in order.
While this is a good way to test drive the service, the 3 free apps are only going to work for extremely lightweight apps (20mb database for example) and does not include a custom domain (this costs $5p/m). Without a custom domain it is obviously limited to non real world app deployment. It's a good marketing attempt but don't think you're going to be hosting real world apps unless you pay.
That's the brilliance of the the model which I believe was pioneered by Heroku. The ingredients are a super easy-to-use platform and a free plan with resource but no time limits. This way you attract people in when they are poor, inexperienced, have no admin skills, and no expectations for success of their app (which is a huge market). By the time they need to upgrade the platform is proven to them and it's a significant pain point if they want to move, so they willingly pay a heavy premium over what the raw resources would cost if they set them up themselves.
That's good to know. Thank you for clearing that up. I think you should put that on the pricing page. But it could just be a minor concern of mine. I've told my friends in case they're interested.
Looks good. I'm going to sign up and setup an account to test some development work. If all goes well, might stay on for production.
Just noticed that the version you have for CodeIgniter seems old. The current CI version is 2.1.0 (http://codeigniter.com/downloads/) , you have it at 2.0.0
