#phpfog

This is a reminder for PHP Fog users regarding the service’s discontinuation.

In order to focus our team and efforts on continuing to build a better solution for developers, we will be fully shutting down the PHP Fog platform in December (all free apps hosted on PHP Fog will be discontinued on December 21, 2012) and focusing solely on AppFog. As we move toward this final date, some services will be disabled along the way.

For more information plus resources to help you begin or complete your migration to AppFog, please read this blog post.

The reason is simple, it's a matter of accommodation!

With a cloud platform I don't have to bother with stuff like:

Server Configuration

Database setup

In the middle of the configuration process something fails

Security

I will have more time to focus on what I should, that is Web Development, I will spend less money per month and I will have specialized people that can answer my issues and give me support if is the case.

The first and the one I use every day at work is Heroku, what I love in Heroku is the simplicity of their service, their support is very handy and awesome, people do want to help you even if you application is something without importance (You understand what I mean). They also "offer" you 750 hours per month, in case your application isn't being too much used (visited) you will not pay anything if you don't reach those 750 hours of processing.

With this I can prevent myself from loosing money without need, if nobody cares and nobody use my application, why should I pay? In a traditional service I have to pay something around 20$ a month, 240$ per year!

Nowadays you have more services like Heroku, like PHP Fog, or the recently service from Red Hat, Open Shift.

http://heroku.com

http://phpfog.com

https://openshift.redhat.com

See if any of them fit your needs, you may thing this is strange at the beginning, and that you will pay a lot when you probably will not, you application will not have so many users as you thought at the beginning and etc..

But thing for a moment that you will have peace of mind in what concerns to things others then your application, you will no longer need to waste hours understanding your server and see what is wrong with it, there are specialized people for that.

Time is money, and when you are not doing your main work you are loosing money.

Since I'm a cheap miser (jk - I'm just haven't made enough cool apps to justify my getting a server) I use the free option on PHPFog to host apps. PHPFog is just like Heroku except with PHP. You use git to push your content to the cloud (no FTP uploads for websites) and they provide easy server setup for your PHP app.

The nice thing about uploading using git is that in the meantime, you can test your application locally. There are, however, a few things to set up so that you can work locally. The most minor details lie in the config files where you'll have to make sure of some things like:

in config.php you really don't want to be setting a base_url since you want your app to work both locally and on PHPFog's servers.

database.php - set it up using the database configuration options from the PHPFog website including the hostname. Now here is one tricky part - I have a hostname of db01-share on PHPFog but I don't want to change that to localhost (cause then when I push the code to the servers, things will not work). So what I did was edit the hosts file on Windows 7 to redirect to 127.0.0.1 (localhost) and this worked fine, but not on Mac Lion. Dammit.

Don't forget to create the user from PHPFog in your own database. This brings up the point of whether phpMyAdmin's sync servers function can be used...but I'm a budding web developer and I have never used that feature before. I always like going the DIY route anyway.

PhPfog the heroku of PHP was hacked by a few teenagers over the weekend. They wrote a great blog post detailing the attack and their response.

The article is well written and brings out a few very nice points. They are making the correct move in embracing the whitehat hacker community.

That said, we highly encourage our users to help us strengthen our security in a pro-active way. If you find a security flaw and report it using the Full Disclosure Policy to [email protected] with notice, we will help strengthen your security reputation in a very public way and reward you generously.

I must really take my hat off for PhPFog. Security is hard and the last thing on your mind when you have a burn rate/investors. This blog post is important and I hope they will pick themselves up and continue.

Good Luck!!

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