[alanstorm]

If you haven't been paying much attention to EC2 until now, getting your head around the pricing structure, what plan makes sense, and the whole "You have a VM but no permanent disk" thing can take some time. PHPFog's value proposition would seem to be "We've figured out EC2 for you, and have default VMs setup for Drupal and Wordpress and a way to deal with those system's need for permanent disk space. If you can get your code in a git repository we'll handle the rest." Just getting Drupal and Wordpress out of a shared hosting environment is a huge win security/stability wise, and if their VMs have a configuration that deals with a lot of the well known attack vectors that aren't shared host related all the better.

I'm not sure that I'd use it myself, because I'd like to spend to time to get familiar with EC2, but with shared hosting becoming a less reliable solution as internet traffic patterns change (and shared hosts increasingly go he commodity route) there's going to be a lot of PHP professionals (and PHP hacks, and non-programmer hacks using PHP systems) looking for a turn-key cloud solution, so I can see the interest in PHPFog.

TL;DR: There's large swaths of the PHP community that doesn't know how to make EC2 work, PHPFog is aiming to be their middleman.

[jeffbarr]

> the whole "You have a VM but no permanent disk" thing can take some time.

Not to sidetrack the discussion, but EC2 has had persistent disk storage since the fall of 2008 ( http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/08/amazon-elastic.html ).

[alanstorm]

Hey, not a sidetrack at all, and I appreciate the link.

At the risk of putting this back on discussion though, from the outside EBS looks like a separate, but complimentary product for EC2, which will further muddy the waters for someone not familiar with Amazon's platform, which leaves room for a someone like PHPFog to swoop in as a middleman to provide a turnkey solution to the problem of getting PHP developers and Drupal/Wordpress site owners up and running in a scalable cloud environment. It's not that this is hard for someone to solves on their own, it's that for a lot of developers in the PHP Ecosystem there's too much inertia to get around to it.

[Keyframe]

getting your head around the pricing structure, what plan makes sense, and the whole "You have a VM but no permanent disk" thing can take some time.

Yeah, an hour or so? Seriously, I still don't get it. There is also this: https://hub.turnkeylinux.org/ from http://www.turnkeylinux.org/ guys. Haven't tried it myself yet, but I really like what they did with turnkeylinux images, they're absolutely amazing for what they are (time savers).

[alanstorm]

When you "don't get it" do you mean for yourself, or for the market? If the former, you can stop reading, because for someone already up on EC2 and devops it doesn't make sense to insert a middle man. If it's the later, here's more to consider.

I think you misunderstanding may step from underestimating the time needed to make the right choice on an EC2 Cloud vs. Slicehost VM vs. Rackspace vs. Shared hosting vs. That guy with the space space in his rack for a PHP application.

For someone not up on EC2 they need to research what the difference between a Standard On-Demand Instance, Micro On-Demand Instance, High-Memory On-Demand Instance, High-CPU On-Demand Instance, Cluster Compute Instance, and Cluster GPU Instance is, and then decide which type of VM they need within that sub-group for their app.

Then they need to figure out where their application touches/stores items on the file system, and decide how they're going to restore that whenever they spawn/restart another EC2 instance. (file uploads, avatar image uploads, etc.) Lots of PHP applications make an assumption about about a readable/writable persistant file system (which, coincidentally, is why shared hosting is such a successful attack vector). The is where PHPFog having the Drupal and Wordpress installs come in handy, the implication there being they've solved that for you.

To get familiar with the EC2 infrastructure to make these choices, they need to make a $63/month investment or pony up the $227.50. Minor, but expensive enough that it creates inertia. If PHPFog gets their pricing right, or they have a compelling marketing pitch that this really is turn-key, they can capture a lot of mindshare right now, and possibly be a disruptive player in a segment of the shared hosting market that's been static for a long time.

None of the above is hard for a technically competent individual, it just takes time. It's plumbing, and (this is the important part), in the world of a PHP developer it's the sort of plumbing that up-till-now can be handled by a reliable shared host, or for larger companies/teams/apps, server operations folks who don't do application programming. That's why there's a lack of EC2 knowledge even among competent profesional PHP folks.

Add in all the people just using Drupal/Wordpress/Joomla/Magento/etc who aren't technically competent and you have a another market segment PHPFog could serve.

Are we looking at a $212 acquisition for PHPFog? Probably not. But that doesn't mean they can't be a successful company, or that they can't use a cash infusion to get the tedious-yet-requiring-a-brain work for getting default installations for all the popular PHP applications running.