Phil Sturgeon has a new post to his blog about what he sees 2012 as being for the PHP community - the year of cloud hosting with all of the platform-as-a-service companies that have started up over the last year.

Cloud hosting is nothing new. Seeing as "cloud" is such a loosely used term some will consider their VPS solutions on Slicehost or Rackspace to be "cloud hosting". That is partially true, but this article covers how PHP is getting some serious attention in the PaaS (Platform as a Service) field. This year you will almost certainly find yourself making the decision wether or not to move some of your applications and services across to the cloud, and this article can hopefully help you work out why and how.

He talks a bit about how the idea compares with Ruby's Heroku hosting service and some of the benefits that come with it:

• Speedy deployments
• Security
• Scaling

He also looks forward to the future, mentioning some of the major players in the PHP PaaS space like Orchestra.io and App Fog (as well as a brief suggestion of a possible PHP beta over at Heroku).