Following a private beta, the platform-as-a-service (hosted on Amazon Web Services) PHP Fog is now generally available following a private beta. It has a free option offering 100MG of storage, a single domain name and 15GB of bandwidth. Paid plans start at $29 a month.
A few months ago, PHP PaaSes were rare. PHP Fog competed with Orchestra and few others. But in recent weeks VMware and Red Hat have announced new PaaS offerings that include PHP support. Still, given the popularity of PHP-based applications like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, there could be room for several PHP platforms on the market.
One handy feature is PHP Fog’s app store-like offering for deploying popular PHP applications like the ones mentioned, as well as PHP frameworks like CakePHP,CodeIgniter and Zend.
The private beta was not without its stumbling blocks – the service was hacked in March. But even Heroku has had security issues in the past and recovered. PHP Fog has explained the many steps it’s taking to improve its security.
PHP Fog is based in Portland, OR and raised $1.8 million in venture capital from Madrona Venture Group,with participation from First Round Capital, Founders Co-Op, and a number of angel investors. in January.