7 of the Easiest Ways to put Your PHP App on the Internet

1. Heroku

Heroku, now a subsidiary of Salesforce, was one of the earliest PaaS products, and is still a very worthwhile option today. One benefit of Heroku is that it has a lot of add-ons you can easily enable for your apps, such as databases and integrations with third-party services.

PHP is officially-supported on Heroku, of course, but they also support many other popular languages, and even more languages have community support through third-party buildpacks.

2. Laravel Forge

Laravel Forge is a bit of an old-school solution compared to the others on this list, but still worth looking into, both because it gives you a little more control over your infrastructure, but also because it can be much cheaper.

While it may seem similar, unlike the other options listed here, Forge isn't a PaaS or an application platform — it's a subscription service that creates and manages your servers for you on the cloud platform of your choice, such as DigitalOcean, Linode or AWS.

While this means you lose out on some of the benefits of a PaaS (such as infinite scalability), it'll still set up and maintain all the infrastructure the average PHP app needs (web servers, databases, etc.), while being potentially much cheaper than a PaaS, as you're only paying for the cost of the infrastructure and the Forge subscription, rather than the (potentially much higher) cost of running your app on a PaaS.

3. DigitalOcean App Platform

DigitalOcean App Platform is a fairly new addition to the PaaS market, but it's a very interesting one as it's backed by the reliability of the DigitalOcean brand, and the pricing is very reasonable.

One interesting advantage of App Platform is that alongside the officially-supported languages, you can also deploy arbitrary container images to the platform, which could be very useful in a pinch.

4. Platform.sh

Platform.sh is a popular PaaS platform used by many large companies, and is even what powers some other PaaS products, such as SymfonyCloud. It prides itself on being "batteries included", meaning all of its plans include a range of managed supporting services, such as databases and cache servers.

5. fortrabbit

fortrabbit is a specialist PHP PaaS that's been trusted by PHP developers for years. While it doesn't support other languages, the focus on PHP comes with potential advantages, such as faster support for new versions of PHP.

6. SymfonyCloud

SymfonyCloud is a PaaS powered by Platform.sh and laser-focused on providing the best possible deployment experience for Symfony apps.

I wasn't able to find anything in the documentation that explicitly states you can't put non-Symfony PHP apps on SymfonyCloud, but it's probably not the best idea.

7. Laravel Vapor

Laravel Vapor is a serverless deployment platform for Laravel apps, powered by AWS.

While limited to Laravel, this is a very enticing option for Laravel developers whose usecases fit what Vapor offers, as the platform is not only fine-tuned to work well with Laravel, it also uses a similar billing model to Laravel Forge, where you only pay for the infrastructure costs and the Vapor subscription ($39/mo or $399/y at time of writing).

Given that serverless platforms tend to be much cheaper than more traditional options, this is very much an option worth exploring if it fits your needs.

It goes without saying that this list doesn't come close to covering every option at your disposal, but I hope it's a good overview of the most interesting and popular options today.

Think your favorite platform should be on this list, but isn't? Feel free to yell at me about it on Twitter.