PORTLAND, OR, AppFog, formerly PHP Fog, the leading cloud-based PHP PaaS hosting service that makes it easy to deploy and scale web based applications, today announced it has secured an $8 million Series B led by Ignition Partners with participation from new investors Simon Crosby and Matt Ocko and previous investors, Madrona Venture Group, First Round Capital and Founders Co-Op.

This brings the company's total funding to $9.8 million. Frank Artale, managing director at Ignition, will join the board of directors, which includes AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson and Madrona partner Tim Porter. AppFog will use the funding to integrate broader technologies and increase the development team working on AppFog, the technology that powers PHP Fog. While the name has changed, AppFog remains fully committed to providing the best possible experience to the millions of PHP users around the world.

According to a number of industry analyst firms, the next big growth area in cloud computing will be the rise of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology, which is beginning to eclipse bare-bones infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) because it dramatically simplifies application lifecycle management and offers users application portability across IaaS providers. AppFog consumes IaaS services, offering a powerful platform that enables application developers to rapidly create and automatically and seamlessly scale PHP-based applications. AppFog was founded in August 2010 and in under a year has added nearly 20,000 application developers who have collectively created and deployed approximately 10,000 applications using its platform.

"The PaaS market is incredibly exciting right now, and while there are a number of new entrants, I was attracted to AppFog for its strong technical and leadership track record," said Artale. "Additionally, their commitment and leadership in open source provides them with a unique position to provide a solid product and help drive a movement that will significantly benefit enterprise IT."

"The growth of public PaaS services has been largely fueled by the demand of individual developers, often creating new apps on smartphones and tablets. AppFog has capitalized on this to develop its platform and to broaden its opportunity beyond the consumer market.

AppFog will make any cloud - public or private - instantly consumable by app developers who don't want to get bogged down in the intricacies of infrastructure services. They want to write apps using languages they know, deliver them to users quickly, and scale them seamlessly and automatically based on end user demand," said Crosby. "The next phase of AppFog's growth will come from the enterprise market, where next-gen apps will be directly developed for a PaaS platform, using whatever language the developer chooses."

The AppFog application stack is designed to provide reliability, ease of use, scalability and speed. The company has talked to thousands of developers and IT departments to understand their unique pain points and build an infrastructure that automates scalability and makes the deployment and management of applications easy. The company is known for its rock-solid service and support, backed by its active developer community.

"We started the company to catalyze the development of PHP apps because it is the most widely used language across consumer and enterprise web based apps. We are deeply committed to the PHP community and to our open source roots, and as we grow, we will leverage our platform to offer the same powerful application development framework to developers who use Node, Ruby, Python, Java, .NET, and more," said Carlson. "Frank Artale brings a wealth of both enterprise and open source experience to AppFog, and will help to guide our strategy as we continue to grow our presence with individual developers and in the enterprise."

About AppFog
AppFog, Inc. is the leading platform-as-a-service provider of PHP solutions. They deliver a reliable, scalable and fast platform for deploying PHP applications in the cloud. AppFog is a private company headquartered in Portland, Oregon. To learn more, visit http://www.appfog.com.