
PHP Fog is Free Forever, and Now Even More Free - cardmagic
http://blog.phpfog.com/2011/12/06/php-fog-is-free-forever-and-now-even-more-free/
======
eykanal
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?

~~~
cardmagic
Full disclosure: I am founder and CEO of PHP Fog

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.

Thanks for all your great questions!

~~~
acangiano
Alternative answer: "Our business model is freemium-based, as shown here:
<https://phpfog.com/pricing> "

~~~
cardmagic
Touche

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jasonkester
What makes Jason angry?

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.

~~~
krobertson
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.

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jcampbell1
My interest in having my business rely on PHP Fog has just dropped to zero.
This strikes me as a company going on tilt.

~~~
joebadmo
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.

~~~
cardmagic
Full disclosure: I am founder and CEO of PHP Fog

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.

~~~
skunkworks
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.

So thank you.

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sanderson1
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.

~~~
Newgy
I suspect Heroku is going to add PHP in the near-term as well.

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djsla
I recommend giving PHPFog a try.

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.

There's always room to improve ;)

Keep up the good work, PHPFog!

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andrewf
I think the Internet has conditioned me to think of Evony whenever I hear the
phrase "Free Forever."

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da_n
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.

~~~
dasil003
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.

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skrebbel
Somewhat off topic, but it looks like their blog has absolutely no link to the
main site. I had to edit the URL to see what it was all about.

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bodegajed
How will they make money? Also, I'm not sure if I want to host my product on
the same server where free loaders are.

~~~
pbreit
> How will they make money?

Paid plans.

> I'm not sure if I want to host my product on the same server where free
> loaders are.

Then don't.

~~~
cardmagic
None of PHP Fog's paid plans share the same app servers as the free plan.

~~~
bodegajed
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.

~~~
cardmagic
Good point!

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methane
It looks great, but I immediately closed that site after I saw that I need to
pay 5$ for a custom domain.

~~~
XLcommerce
are you serious? So you want a free domain too? some people!

~~~
omarchowdhury
$60 a year for a domain is a bit much.

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ww520
What does it mean by even more free (sic)? Getting paid to use the service?

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zeroecco
and you get those three apps free forever, can't skip that little tidbit :)

~~~
pluies_public
Or until PHPFog goes bust/gets bought.

~~~
cardmagic
Crazier things have happened, but it is hard to go bust with $10M in the bank
- [http://blog.phpfog.com/2011/08/11/what-php-fog-will-do-
with-...](http://blog.phpfog.com/2011/08/11/what-php-fog-will-do-with-8m/)

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malachismith
Oh HELL yeah

~~~
lostsock
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

Any chance you could update it?

~~~
cardmagic
Yes, we will update it shortly!

