PHP Fog is Free Forever, and Now Even More Free

Kind of funny to have this making front page while the "Don't be a free user" link (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3320931" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3320931</a>) is the top story. What is the business model here?

What makes Jason angry?<p>Company blogs that have the company logo linked back to the blog rather than the company.<p>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?<p><pre><code> - 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. </code></pre> 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.

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

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.<p>This is an interesting move, but not totally unexpected. It'll be interesting to see how the next couple of months play out.

I recommend giving PHPFog a try.<p>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.<p>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):<p>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.<p>There's always room to improve ;)<p>Keep up the good work, PHPFog!

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Oh HELL yeah