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Comment by cmelbye | Hacker News Reader

like Heroku, but better

Somehow I doubt that, but the service looks interesting. I wonder if there is a market for high quality PHP hosting.

I have to agree. I really like the concept of the service, and I am sure it will find some niches, but I don't think I have ever considered "...like X, but better..." a strong marketing argument.

I would suggest just comparing it to Heroku and then specifying how your service is different, instead of making a claim about how one should be valued over the other.

Best of luck regardless.

"Like Heroku but for PHP" would have been a less arrogant slogan IMHO.

Actually a lot of top tier websites are built in PHP (Facebook's front end is a good example) and so I don't doubt there is middle tail in there that might jump on a Heroku-style managed black box hosting platform.

The only reason they can use PHP in the front end is because they have a lot of different backend and frontend services to compensate for it speed-wise. Facebook uses HipHop, backend services written with C/Java/etc(?), and lots of interesting frontend JavaScript stuff to speed up page loads. Wikipedia has literally hundreds of Squid servers to cache requests, so most visitors never touch code that was just generated with PHP. Needless to say, this would be unlikely to be possibly using PHP Fog. (This comment sort of turned into a PHP is slow argument, oops. My point should still come across though)

It's also not quantified in any way. Better how? Overall, the marketing copy there is really weak. Lots of fluff, not enough structure, and way too light on details.

Exactly. Heroku gives me all kinds of awesome packages like NewRelic, Memcache, Postgres, and literally about a dozen more at the click of a mouse. Not to mention DelayedJobs.

I don't see what these guys really have to offer me that could even be close to on par with this, but time will tell.

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