StackBlaze

Founded in 2011 by Chris Leydon, StackBlaze is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider headquartered in Hove, United Kingdom, specializing in scalable PHP cloud hosting. The company aims to simplify cloud infrastructure management for developers, allowing them to focus on coding while the platform handles server setup, maintenance, and updates. StackBlaze's core offering revolves around streamlining the deployment process from development to production. A key milestone for the company was securing $55.1K in a seed funding round on May 1, 2011.

The business operates in the cloud application hosting market, catering to developers and development teams. Its business model is subscription-based, offering tiered pricing plans that include a certain amount of credit per month. Clients are billed by the minute for their usage of applications and databases, meaning they only pay for the resources they actively consume. StackBlaze offers "Starter," "Pro," and "Enterprise" plans to accommodate projects ranging from small starter applications to larger production workloads.

The platform enables developers to deploy code as a web service with ease. It can build code into a container either from a user-provided Dockerfile or by automatically detecting the codebase. Once built, the application is deployed to a development environment with a unique URL. The service supports a wide range of languages and frameworks, including Node.js, Python, Go, Ruby, Java, and PHP, without requiring code changes for deployment. Distinctive features include a grid-style network infrastructure and a "CustomStack" feature that allows for the creation of a customized stack through a graphical user interface (GUI), removing the need for complex server configuration. The platform also provides autoscaling to manage traffic spikes, built-in monitoring for performance tracking, automated daily backups, and DDoS protection.

Keywords: Platform-as-a-Service, PaaS, cloud hosting, PHP hosting, application deployment, developer tools, cloud infrastructure, server management, continuous deployment, containerization, Docker support, scalable hosting, GUI interface, autoscaling, web service deployment, development environment, infrastructure management, Node.js hosting, Python hosting, Go hosting, Ruby hosting, Java hosting, code deployment