This sucks.<p>But actually, I'm glad to hear it. Over the past 2 weeks (since we upgraded matchist to a PHP Fog dedicated server), their support team has basically dropped off the face of the earth.<p>Their support live chat disappeared. Their phone number goes to voicemail. And there's no way to get a hold of them other than their ticketing system (which they respond to every few days if you're lucky).<p>I loved PHP Fog when I first heard of it and started using it 6 months ago. But honestly, I'm not sure we're going to switch to AppFog since it's the same team. Not sure I want that level (lack) of service.
Just got the email:<p>Dear Fogger,<p>It is with a heavy heart that I let you know that the PHP Fog service will be discontinued in December in favor of AppFog, which is PHP Fog 2.0. I am incredibly sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you.<p>Creating PHP Fog has been an amazing experience for us and it could not have happened without you––thank you for your support. With your help, we’ve built an amazing PaaS for PHP developers. And along the way, we’ve applied what we’ve learned to creating our new product, AppFog.<p>AppFog is the future of our business, and we very strongly believe it is also the future of PaaS. So, in order to focus our team and efforts on continuing to build a better solution for developers, we will be shutting down the PHP Fog platform this coming January and focusing solely on AppFog.<p>We have considered this change very, very carefully because we understand that this could present challenges for some of our users. But in the end, we are confident that moving to AppFog will give you additional flexibility, additional languages, additional infrastructures, and the ability to deploy your apps to private cloud infrastructure as well as leverage the strengths of the OpenStack and Cloud Foundry ecosystems.<p>To help in the migration, we will do be doing everything we can to help this be as easy and painless as possible:
2GB of RAM in our Free Plan
We will be releasing a series of blog posts that walk you through the migration to AppFog.
We will also be publishing documentation of the migration path as well as solutions for some of the edge-case differences between the platforms.
To start with, we have created a migration FAQ that should help you begin the migration process.<p>I am committed to making AppFog a product that will make you look back at PHP Fog and think, “I’m really happy I switched.”
I had the worst experience with appfog/phpfog. They ignore emails and state things on their hp that are clearly not true (like they would support .NET which they are not).<p>Should have been warned whem some time ago a 15year old hacked their system and controlled all their servers.
As a current customer since 7/11 (over a year) I am SHOCKED they aren't working on automating a process to migrate over to AppFog. I guess they don't want my business - off to heroku and/or ec2.
A bit of a positive note here, I found that PHP Fog was more difficult to use than AppFog. I had some higher-level issues with Apache on the PHP version of AppFog that I brought up and were quickly addressed.<p>It might sting now, but those that used PHPFog might like AppFog more.
Well done, a lot of people are going to be unhappy about this. I think it takes courage to take the pain upfront and concentrate on doing one thing really well.
Which has a pretty low limit on the database (100mb), no dedicated database, no persistent file system (there goes a large portion of PHP downloadable software), no monitoring and you have to retool the way your database works, using json, in a way that no other hosting service does.
Personally I will give AppFog a try. If you're the sort of person who liked PHP Fog, the alternatives are not THAT great. Here's a good roundup from last month:<p>But regarding the business transition over at App Fog, you know what's really strange: Why does the 'dead simple' migration process start with creating a new account? Isn't it the same company? At the very least, if I were in charge of AppFog I wouldn't make everyone sign up again. Just saying.<p><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i>
Signing up for AppFog<p>First things first: score yourself a free AppFog account at console.appfog.com. It’s the same thing we’ve all done a million times: e-mail, password, and then e-mail verification.
I think the solution is to find another service. How can I trust appfog after this terrible surprise? Tomorrow I will receive an email. We are very sorry but appfog will be dicontinued.
I feel sorry for all the small businesses relying on PHP Fog who maybe don't have an in-house IT team and will really struggle to meet this very short deadline. I'm talking about the kind of business, who may have hired someone to build a small app for them on PHP Fog, and to do anything with IT they have to hire an outside IT consultant by the hour.<p>I would encourage App Fog to offer a "fully managed" migration option, even if it's for a token fee.