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PHP Fog Raises $1.8 Million To Be The Heroku Of PHP
- gexla 16y agoAnyone else tired of hearing about "the Heroku of x?" However, you can be pretty sure you hit the right combo of good timing and implementation when your own startup is followed by services which are referred to as "[insert your startup name] of x." ETA: Let's have some fun and play with the tagline they have on their pricing page which is "Like Heroku, but better." Like Heroku, but without ninjas and rockstars. Like Heroku, but better, but less cool.
- aresant 16y agoTired or not it's not a bad way to make value proposition clear and in hindsight is pretty handy: - "Youtube is the flickr of Video" - http://slashdot.org/articles/05/08/14/1320217.shtml http://slashdot.org/articles/05/08/14/1320217.shtml - "AdMob is the doubleclick of mobile" http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/11/google_buys_adm.html http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/200... etc
- gexla 16y agoSure, but wouldn't it be better if you could make that proposition from your own presentation without having to refer to other services? If PHPFog is the Heroku of PHP, then what was Heroku the Heroku of? ;)
- aresant 16y agoYou do realize that "The Heroku Of PHP" is not a line from PHPFog right? It's how TechCrunch is explaining what the site is. http://www.phpfog.com/ http://www.phpfog.com/
- gexla 16y agoActually, it's right on their pricing page. Maybe they didn't think of the line themselves, but it's on their site and not as a quote. PHP Fog is like Heroku for PHP. But better. We will provide simple one-click installations of some of the most popular PHP applications out there. ETA: However, I do agree that "like Heroku for PHP" is a big difference from "is Heroku for PHP." My mistake.
- robryan 16y agoIt's a good way of explaining it to people as many more have heard of Heroku. It's not like their directly competing so I can't see a negative side.
- StavrosK 16y agoIt's the equivalent of defining a term. You could offer a synonym, or you could circumlocute.
- netcan 16y agoAnalogies carry a lot of meaning, often subtle and hard to get across in a paragraph, let alone a line. Who else would you explain it? PHP cloud hosting? Peoples understanding of a thing is not always very high res. Take 'evolution by natural selection'. Some people understand the mechanics, consequences and how A leads to B quite well, some don't. People assciate all sorts of things outside of the mechanics with it: 'aha moment,' 'prototypical scientific theory,' 'gradual process,' 'controversy,' 'cornerstone theory,' etc. etc. You can get at this fuzzy nebulae of meanings and associations via analogies: "Darwin of climate science," "Natural Selection of Geology," "Intelligent Design of Feminism." A lot of people don't know exactly what Heroku is, they know it's getting a lot of buzz, have heard the praise, have heard customers staunchly defending the prices, etc. They might be inclined to check out a Heroku (or for example, app engine) for their language.
- steveklabnik 16y agoI agree when a company's mission seems simple, it might be overkill. But this kind of analogy was the only way of getting people to reasonably understand what my first startup did. "We're the EC2 of manufacturing."
- nl 16y agoImagine explaining it from first principles: Q: "Please explain what your application does, without comparing it to anything" A: "It's the Heroku of PHP".. No! A: "It's like EC2, but preconfigured for PHP with less control".. No! A: "It's like shared web hosting, but with better performance characteristics and somewhat more control".. No! ..... A: "You get a server on the internet, where you can install PHP stuff. Except you don't actually have a server, and it is preconfigured to automatically scale your app across virtual machines. It comes with a set of tools and scripts to make installing stuff easy, and you don't need to administer it. By letting us concentrate on system admin and scaling it gives you more time to concentrate on building your application." Q: "Oh, you mean like Heroku, except for PHP?" A: "FUUUUUUUUUUUU"
- Timzzz 16y agonice work!I hope to use it when I can get an account. I just hope it is as easy as they say.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- tmcw 16y agoDon't really get this one. First off, PHP doesn't have the deploy/run process of Sinatra/Ruby/Node/etc. Second, 1.8 mil isn't much money; that's probably the amount you could bootstrap with some past success. And the business-plan-like graphic doesn't reveal that there's anything interesting in their tech approach than any commodity hosting.
- chanrises 16y agoI am also confused. What are the benefits of phpfog if it normally only takes 15 min to create a linux server with php/mysql on amazon ec2? The only things I could see different are db slave replication and http caching, but generally those you don't worry till much later, and are not critical.
- aheilbut 16y agoDoes it really take that much time to create a linux server with rails on EC2? Energy barriers seem to matter.
- mikey_p 16y agoI think most of the people that could do that for the LAMP stack could probably get through setting up a Ruby or node server without too much extra time. Also, once you're done it, how hard is it do repeat? Yet I don't see folks making these same arguments against Heroku. One of the key points I got from talking to Lucas is that he's focusing not just on scalability, but HA, which is something that while not hard to do for the LAMP stack, isn't trivial either (usually it's just a matter of time spent setting it up). The other neat (or annoying step) is that PHPFog goes the git route for handling your code. Just signing up and creating a site puts a default codebase for the platform you've selected into your git repo, and you just check it out, and commit to get started.
- gexla 16y agoWith Phusion Passenger, a Ruby environment is just as easy to setup these days as PHP. Back when Heroku first started, I don't think Phusion Passenger existed. However, the point of these services isn't necessarily to save the developer from having to setup these environments, but rather it's to save the developer from worrying about having to setup a solid, scalable production setup. You still should have a development setup which lives somewhere other than Heroku.
- dylanz 16y agoCongrats Lucas!
- cardmagic 16y agoThank you!
- encoderer 16y agoLike the service, hate the name. Though I personally would like it better if it included plug-and-play framework too. (Heroku has Rails, for example)
- pstinnett 16y agoWhy is Shopify listed under the apps? I always thought Shopify was a hosted rails app.
- cardmagic 16y agohttp://blog.shopify.com/2010/6/18/official-php-adapter-for-shopify-api http://blog.shopify.com/2010/6/18/official-php-adapter-for-s...
- noodle 16y agoi hope the funding will allow you to create a free plan, like heroku. i like the idea of whats provided. i don't like the pricing structure.
- cmelbye 16y agoThe future is heterogeneous Platform as a Service (for example, http://dotcloud.com/ http://dotcloud.com/) in my opinion. I can't imagine going back to Heroku where I can only host Ruby along with a selection externally hosted add-ons.