The folks over at Fortrabbit.com have officially announced the opening of their cloud-based, PHP-focused hosting platform:

We do managed hosting for over 5 years - a business where reliability is one of the core values. And Platform as a Service is just a label for a modern approach of scalable hassle-free hosting solutions. This PaaS market is very young and still a changing category in the wide field of cloud hosting. Listening to customers and their needs will influence the way current services work.

They offer a "Bootstrap" service if you'd like to try it out. It supports PHP 5.4, APC, MySQL, Git integration, Composer support, SSH/SFTP access and DNS management. You can also add on memcache and SSL support if desired.

On the Fortrabbit.com blog there's a new post that does a quick overview and comparison of 11 of the more popular cloud-based hosting platforms out there that are PHP friendly.

We are currently building yet another PHP Cloud Platform ourselves. Of course we looked around to see what the others are up to. This is my (Franks) personal point of view of the current market situation showcasing my favorite services. I try not to judge, neither i will compare features nor prices.

Services on his list include:

• Heroku
• phpFog/appFog
• PagodaBox
• CloudControl
• EngineYard

The ServerGrove blog has a recent post for the Symfony2 users out there, showing how you can spool emails on a VPS/shared hosting using SwiftMailer and the Symfony2 bundle to interact with it.

When you send an email, the mailer communicates with a remote server in charge of receiving the message and of delivering it to the recipient. This process can cause your form to submit slowly as it depends on how fast the mail server responds. Spooling allows us to decouple the application execution line from the process of the sending one, two, or as many emails as we need.

They show you how to configure the SwiftMailerBundle with the mail server's settings, how to set up the command to send the emails and the settings you'll need to put in your cron file to run the "send" operation periodically.

In this new tutorial on NetTuts.com Phil Sturgeon looks at how to "elevate your PHP" to a cloud-based hosting service, specifically Pagoda Box.

This article will walk you through cloud hosting for your PHP application with Pagoda Box. It'll detail how to handle PHP dependencies, get your MySQL databases up and running (and debug locally), and customise various aspects of PHP with ease.

He walks you through the entire process you'll need to fire up a (free) application on their service (including a database!):

• Sign up for a new account
• Create an application
• Set up git
• Create your public SSH key and upload it to Pagoda
• Commit to your repository and deploy your code

He also mentions a custom option Pagoda Box has included in their series - the Boxfile. This configuration file allows you to set up things like the environment you want your app to run in (PHP 5.3, MySQLi extension, etc) and set up some of the php.ini configuration settings. He also shows you how to set up the database instance and how to use their "pagoda" gem to create a temporary SSH tunnel from your development environment to their database server. He also briefly mentions the option they have of using a real domain name to point to your application.

Phil Sturgeon has a new post to his blog about what he sees 2012 as being for the PHP community - the year of cloud hosting with all of the platform-as-a-service companies that have started up over the last year.

Cloud hosting is nothing new. Seeing as "cloud" is such a loosely used term some will consider their VPS solutions on Slicehost or Rackspace to be "cloud hosting". That is partially true, but this article covers how PHP is getting some serious attention in the PaaS (Platform as a Service) field. This year you will almost certainly find yourself making the decision wether or not to move some of your applications and services across to the cloud, and this article can hopefully help you work out why and how.

He talks a bit about how the idea compares with Ruby's Heroku hosting service and some of the benefits that come with it:

• Speedy deployments
• Security
• Scaling

He also looks forward to the future, mentioning some of the major players in the PHP PaaS space like Orchestra.io and App Fog (as well as a brief suggestion of a possible PHP beta over at Heroku).

On the php|architect site today Keith Casey has posted a recording of an interview with Boaz Ziniman of Zend about one of their latest offerings, phpcloud - a platform-as-a-service to provide easy, scalable PHP application hosting.

At the tail end of ZendCon 2011 in October, I managed to corner Boaz Ziniman to chat on the launch of their new product phpcloud. We covered features, limitations, design & implementation considerations, and how it's different than most of the other options out there.

If you'd like to listen, you can grab the mp3 here. It's about 15 minutes long. You can find out more about Zend's cloud offering on phpcloud.com.

In a new post to his blog today Kevin Schroeder answers a question about a product his employer, Zend currently offers - what is phpcloud.com?

Well that's a stupid question, isn't it? It's "Development done right", "Fast, Elastic, Dependable" and on "Any Cloud", right? If you are unclear as to what phpcloud.com is, what the Zend Application Fabric is and what the DevCloud is then this is a good post for you.

The phpcloud platform offers their own Zend Application fabric to provide resources based on the needs at the time and the DevCloud, a "slice" of these resources for you to try out for your development.

So, the Fabric is the loom, DevCloud is a thread spool and phpcloud.com is the lever you pull to start.

Hasin Hayder has put together a list of cloud hosting providers that are already set and ready to go for PHP applications. His list highlights a few of the free ones.

I will be focusing on some of these free cloud hosting options available out there. One thing to note before you proceed - these free cloud hosting options are very good to develop and test your applications (in dev+staging environment) and it may not be wise to deploy the production version of your application with any free plan (Except Amazon AWS's free tier, its production ready).

He has four different services on his list, ranging anywhere from small to industrial strength, depending on your needs:

• Amazon's AWS
• PHPFog
• PHPCloud (from Zend)
• Heroku (traditionally Ruby, now supports PHP too)

The ServerGrove blog, a hosting provider whose services include shared hosting, has posted a guide to help you deploy to shared hosting with Capifony, a Symfony-based tool for use with Capistrano.

This article is meant to help you configure and deploy your projects developed with Symfony2 into a Shared Hosting environment, so if you need to deploy using capifony on a VPS, please read this article.

You'll need ssh access to the server to get things set up for the deployment as well as a local environment where you can install Ruby and Ruby Gems (their platform for the example is OSX). They help you get those installed and generate a key for use with the deployment. Once this key is copied over to the remote system, you can then set up the config to use the password-less connection and to deploy from either a local repository or a remote location (like github).

Christian Weiske has a new post about a move the phpfarm tool has made over to SourceForge for its project page. phpfarm makes it simple to switch between multiple versions of PHP on the same server to make debugging and development a much simpler task (especially if you're not in a homogeneous environment).

phpfarm, the tool that lets you install multiple PHP versions beside each other, finally got a proper project page on SourceForge. By moving from svn.php.net to SF, phpfarm got a nice git repository, a wiki and a ticketing system. It also has a Phing build file now which generates and uploads release files, so people don't have to install git to get phpfarm.

His post also includes some of the changes made in the latest release (0.1.0) and how you can clone the code from the SF.net repository.