Andrew Podner has a new post to his site today talking about platform as a service providers out there that offer PHP support. He mentions three different ones, but goes into more depth on getting a site set up with AppFog.

There are several options out there for PHP apps using this medium for deployment, and picking one is not always the easiest thing to do. The most interesting thing that I noticed about the various PaaS providers that I looked at was they way they differentiate their pricing models. [...] The PaaS providers do not make the choice nearly as simple [as VPS providers]. Each of them has different options to consider and different terminology that describes their particular product offering.

He briefly covers the offerings of three providers - Engine Yard/Orchestra, PagodaBox and AppFog. Its the final one he's most interested in, so he gets into the details and steps you'll need to create an account, set up an application and make your first push out to their platform. He also includes a hint on how to set up a .htaccess file if your application's document root is in something other than the base directory.

If you're a PHPFog user, you know that they're discontinuing the service in favor of their AppFog product. If you're looking to migrate over to this from PHPFog, you should check out this new article from PHPMaster.com with some of the differences between the two services.

Have you heard PHPFog is coming to an end? No, well - it is. That’s right, in a recent announcement on their mailing list, the company has said that PHPFog will be no more by the end of January, 2013. But if you’re on their platform, don’t panic! The new, combined platform may be even better than what you’re accustomed to with them now.

He talks about some of the things that are different including the technologies it employs, addons it provides, the differing deployment process and when teh final cut-off date is. He links to their own migration guide for most of the steps but mentions one specific change that might trip you up - the change to store connection information in the "VCAP_SERVICES" environment variable.

Hasin Hayder has a quick post to his blog today about how you can configure an AppFog instance to be able to run Zend Framework-based projects on them.

AppFog is quite a popular polyglot PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider and it comes with a generous free plan for the developers. [...] Recently, I was looking for a solution on how to host a Zend Framework based application in AppFog. The main problem was that the url must point to the /public folder inside the app and from there it is initialized. After searching for some time, I found the clue in AppFog's doumentation which is you'll have to redirect all the traffic from the parent domain to the /public/index.php file using the URL rewrite rules.

The rewrite rules are included in the post for easy cut-and-pasting. With the recently announced closing of their phpFog service (in favor of just supporting AppFog) I'm sure this tip could come in handy for a lot of developers out there.

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).