There are quite a few cloud hosting Platform-as-a-Service providers out there to do the heavy lifting for web application developers who expect a certain amount of traffic for their sites. A new provider called fluxflex aims at differentiating itself from Heroku, Google App Engine, DotCloud and others by being offering an extra-easy to use “one-click install” solution at relatively low costs: the service is free to start, with prices for upgrades starting at $1 per month.
fluxflex says that apart from experienced developers, the main target group for their namesake, deeply Github-integrated platform are personal and “casual” web application developers who don’t want to invest much time in maintaining their cloud hosting environment. These users can install applications (WordPress, Rails, Django etc.) with “one click” (instead of using original commands), customize them using Git, and share any GitHub repositories with other users at the library.
CEO Kei Kubo tells me he sees fluxflex as a “social hosting” platform on which members of the community can communicate with each other, learn best practices from more experienced users and share applications with others.
fluxflex also makes it possible to import and deploy projects from Github automatically and currently supports PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, Node.js and Haskell (for a more detailed feature set, click here). In the future, the plan is to add languages and frameworks, next to more applications that users can install with one click.
San Francisco- and Tokyo-based fluxflex has raised US$240,000 in angel money so far.