Interesting. I got the contrary impression: that from top to bottom this looks like a serious company that's going for a sustainable freemium business model, with no intention of flipping. I mean, this isn't a consumer-facing mobile-social-photo-check-in app. It's a platform for developers that has a pretty clear selection of tiered products that includes an introduction tier that's free, for development and testing on shared domain and servers. And they seem to have a pretty clear focus on their customer: developers.
Joe hit it right on the nail here. We examined our costs very carefully and found some room to give back to our community.
The right blend that we were going for was give enough to do dev/test for free, and be reasonably priced (https://phpfog.com/pricing) when you are ready for production.
When Linode gives away more RAM or AWS makes inbound traffic free, it is not a sign these companies are less trustworthy, but that they love their users. We love developers and are trying to do right by them.
Just wanted to say thank you for doing this. It was a rather fortuitous coincidence because I'm starting on a Drupal project and was evaluating hosting options to use for development. I am exactly the demographic you mentioned: use for dev, with a strong consideration of upgrading for production.
Me, too. I'd much rather see a company with near-zero marginal costs spend money on a free tier than on sales people and marketing programs. It's so much more revealing to actually use a service than listen to a salesperson or trial a service for 30 days.
