Like a Heroku for PHP, PHP Fog is launching to the public today in order to help PHP developers deploy and scale their applications in the cloud. Raising $1.8 million in a round lead by Madrona and followed on by First Round, Founders Co-Op and others. PHP Fog launched in private beta in December and is now available for all members of the public.
Aside from focusing solely on PHP, what PHP Fog does differently than Heroku (and all encompassing competitor dotCloud) is that it provides users with an PHP app store, which lets people build out Drupal and WordPress sites without needing to know how to code. The service starts out as free with shared hosting and then ranges from $29 – $249 depending on how many servers you want dedicated.
Says founder Lucas Carlson, “When I started the company I thought, ‘Why isn’t anyone doing this for PHP, it’s a much bigger market?’ Out of the top one million webpages, 330K run PHP and and only 5K run Ruby. This is a much bigger opportunity, and I’ve been lucky because I’ve been able to cash in on this opportunity.”
Since its funding in December, PHP Fog has hired a team of developers (8) and signed up 13,000 people on its beta list; “It took Heroku a year to sign up 10,000 people and it took us 6 months to sign up 13,000 people, so we’re going twice as fast.”
In addition to hiring and building out more applications, Carlson admits that a name change is in the cards (PHP Fog is the pretty much most boring startup name I’ve ever written about, and I wrote about Shwowp). He has big plans and eventually wants the service to be the “Amazon of PaaS.”
Rolling out to 1,000 people per day over the past week, PHP Fog is currently available for anyone who wants to sign up here.