Last week I had cause to look for a cheap/free wordpress host for a project at work. WordPress.com was the instant first choice, but seeing as everyone on the project was an experienced web developer/designer, we found we needed a little more control than the free option offered us.

I had a quick think and remembered Edward extoling the virtues of PHPFog.

“It’s like Heroku for PHP!”

WordPress is written in PHP, and PHPFog (like Heroku) has a free plan with just enough resources to get a site off the ground.

“Perfect!” I thought. “There must be a way to get WordPress on there!”

Easy Peasy

Turns out there is, and it’s really easy. As soon as you create an account with PHPFog, you’re taken to a page with a big list of commonly installed apps that you can drop onto your (shared) app server and WordPress is right at the top.

From there it was a breeze: We filled in the login info we wanted and the PHPFog back end did the rest. It took a few minutes for everything to spool up, but once it did we had our very own Wordress installation to play with and tweak to our hearts content.

Scaling Up

Naturally the resources available on the free plan wouldn’t stand up to a huge amount of traffic, but at that point one could easily upgrade or export one’s content to be relocated elsewhere.

So, if you find yourself in need of a pop-up wordpress instance on the cheap, have a gander at PHPFog!