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.

In this new post to his blog, Cal Evans shows developers (and non-developers) how they can set up a free WordPress blog with the help of the phpcloud.com and phpfog.com hosted services.

Everyone however, experiments. Whether it’s a new theme or a new plugin, you really, really need someplace to test things. one of the worst thing you can do is what I do with this blog, just install things and play with them in production. [...] There is a solution though, actually, I’ll present you with two. One for PHP developers who know what they are doing and want control, and one for regular bloggers who just want someplace to test plugins and themes before pushing them live. In both cases though, the services are free.

He gives a brief introduction to setting up and configuring each of the services - one that lets you import your own version and the other that lets you select to automagically setup a WordPress instance.

On the "A Cloudy Place" blog there's a recent post comparing two of the more popular platform-as-a-service PHP offerings out there - PHPFog and PagodaBox.

Platform services like Heroku and AppEngine have been well-known for the last few years and many companies have been using them successfully in their business. They are more attractive to startups, due to low initial cost and smaller headaches involved in setup. 2011 was a great year for platform services, with the emergence of many platform services and a new trend for supporting multiple languages instead of supporting a single language. [...] Here, I will go through two of the PHP platform services I have experimented with: PHPFog and Pagoda Box.

He talks about each of the options and looks at several key elements of each including the deployment process, scalability, monitoring tools, offerings for caching and the database management utilities bundled with the application. Both services offer a "free instance" for you to try out their services, so give them both a try and see what you think.

Josh Adell has posted a quick start guide to getting your application up and running on the PHPFog PHP platform as a service offering.

Being it was Christmas and all, I decided to give myself a present and sign up. I was very surprised by how easy it was to get up and running. I managed to build a simple "echo" service in about i.8 minutes, following roughly these steps.

It was as simple as "launching" a new custom application, waiting for it to become available, cloning the git repository and setting up a simple app. In his case , it's a basic Silex-based app that makes a simple site to greet users with a "Hello world" message. Throw in a basic .htaccess file and the app is all set to push.

PHPFog, the PHP-centric platform as a service has made a new post to this blog about two new "gifts" they're providing to developers:

I want to thank you for your interest in PHP Fog. Thanks to you and tens of thousands of developers like you, we have grown massively in the last year and a half. As a sign of my gratitude, I’d like to give you two free gifts.

Their gifts to the community are a conversion of the 6 month applications over to a free-for-life product and you can now deploy three of these "free forever" applications instead of just the one. You can signup here for the service with offerings of installed software like PyroCMS, Drupal 7, MediaWiki and Slim. For more information, you can attend this webinar.

PHPClasses.org has posted the latest episode of their "Lately In PHP" podcast series, a look at the cloud hosting PHPFog now offers including an interview with Lucas Carlson, CEO of PHPFog.

On the Lately in PHP podcast episode 13, Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert interview Lucas Carlson, founder and CEO of PHPFog, to tell us about the advantages of using a Cloud Hosting service that is optimized to address needs that are specific to PHP Web sites and applications. They also comment on the PHP 5.3.6 forked version released by Robert Eisele and the PHP features being voted for inclusion in version 5.4.

You can listen to this latest episode in a few different ways - either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

From Saltwater.eu today there's a comparison of PHPFog and Orchestra, two services that offer cloud-based scalable PHP deployments that can happen at the push of a button.

I am evaluating these platforms in order to see if either one can ease my sysadmin burden. Well, so far, as with any cloud service promising the next best thing since sliced bread, I got mixed feelings. For the moment I tested just the free tier of both platforms. While Orchestra uses a pay-as-you-go model, PHP Fog asked for $29/mo in order to drag that number of servers slider. That’s a little bit much for a plain evaluation aka not so cloud-ish model where you don’t need upfront investments.

The reviewer walks through the setup of each side - the server creation and configuration, how things are handled with the load balancer, the caching layer, the application server technology stack, app design considerations and the deployment process.

On the PHPFog blog there's a recent post explaining their service in a bit more detail and how it provides the PHP applications out there with a huge amount of scalability that a traditional virtual server can't.

PHP Fog is a new type of hosting provider for PHP applications developers to build applications the good old-fashioned way but with easy scaling, reliability, speed, and easy deployment/management compared to traditional shared/dedicated hosting.

They look at a few situations where scalability can play a key role - traffic surge, growth leads to performance degradation and underutilized servers - and how the answers to these issues are best described as "scaling up", "scaling out" or scaling down", all things that more traditional hosting doesn't do well. Cloud-based platforms, like PHPFog (or Orchestra) can give you that high availability you need, so no matter the situation.

On the php|architect blog today there's a new post from Joel Clermont about some of the recent cloud-based offerings that have popped up in the PHP world - Platform as a Service solutions that can help take the effort out of the usual application hosting issues.

Enter the newcomer to the world of PHP deployment options: Platform as a Service (PaaS). You may be rolling your eyes at the introduction of yet another buzzword and acronym, but before you dismiss it, consider how it might fit in to your application hosting strategy. I've heard Platform as a Service described as a "layer above the cloud," that is, it builds on the existing cloud infrastructure, like Amazon's EC2, but abstracts away all the setup and maintenance tasks of running an entire server. As David Coallier described it to me, the goal is to "deploy apps, not servers."

Joel mentions two different offerings that have popped up recently - PHPFog and Orchestra. Both services have some nice features that he gets into including application templates, git integration and configuration for specific kinds of technologies (like database support and memcache availability).