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Co-creator here. We built forestry.io because we hate dealing with shitty cPanel-type hosting providers and we think WordPress is often overkill for simple sit

Co-creator here. We built forestry.io because we hate dealing with shitty cPanel-type hosting providers and we think WordPress is often overkill for simple sites. We all build simple sites every now and then. You know...your bother's band, your friend's restaurant, etc. They're a pain to set up and manage. This is just a demo, but we would love your feedback! *YC people - put in a good word for us for the fellowship program ;)

sokoloff 11y ago
My first question would be: why not just use an S3 bucket directly, with web hosting enabled? http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHostin...
- sgallant 11y ago
  Yeah, good question. S3 is a hassle for some people (designer-types) and we're building additional services around the hosting part (form submissions, a simple CMS, etc). If you get a chance, try out the demo and let me know what you think. scottgallant[at]gmail
- sgarg26 11y ago
  It's a good question. Reminds me of the first time I heard about Dropbox - I thought, 'why not just do a rsync'?
gkoberger 11y ago
You might want to charge (a lot) more. How many $1/mo accounts will you need to make any sort of profit?
- sgallant 11y ago
  Our math tells us that $1/month will result in surprisingly high margins, however, we're hoping to sell services around the hosting of static sites. Need an e-commerce back-end? Premium templates? etc. Did you try the demo? Would you use this kind of thing? Do you find yourself building stupidly simple sites for everyone you know (like I do)?
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    > Our math tells us that $1/month will result in surprisingly high margins What happens when a site uses too much bandwidth for this to hold? The first thing I looked for was information about storage and bandwidth limits, but I don't see that anywhere.
    - sgallant 11y ago
      That's a good point. It's really going to be a game of averages. Most small websites that I build (for restaurants, bands, conversion pages, etc) get a negligible amount of traffic. But every now and then there will be a site that sees 100x that traffic.
      - JoshTriplett 11y ago
        Or 100000x that traffic. One $1/month site that bursts to unexpectedly excessive bandwidth could wipe out the margins on thousands of such sites. Storage is easy to set limits on in advance, but you're going to want some sensible limits on bandwidth usage too. With some care, you could do so via throttling (fixed average bandwidth with bursting) so that you never need to cut a site off entirely.
    - Nadya 11y ago
      Those are outliers and are rarer than you think. Ask anyone who offers free hosting how many of these large sites they have. Heliohost, as an example, only restricts sites based on CPU Usage. Free hosting of up to 500MB, unlimited bandwidth. But metered CPU Usage. Even then that's hard to hit.
- Nadya 11y ago
  Hosting is cheap. Especially hosting static sites. For e-commerce (coming soon?), contact forms, and content editing. They charge extra to use their barebones CMS. That's where the real profit will be coming from. $11/yr for a contact form is another $1/month for a very basic service. Content-Editable is another $3~/mo that people would take advantage of (ie: tech user hosting the static site here and handing it off to a non-tech user, rather than having to edit the HTML for any future content edits).
curun1r 11y ago
What about Divshot, BitBalloon, Netlify and Github Pages? Between the 4 of those, there's a range of prices and functionality that fit pretty much any need. Note that the goal of this question is to help you explain what makes you unique, not to as a gotcha. I'd like to get an idea of when your offering is the appropriate choice since I'm looking at needing a static webhost in the next few months.
- ChristianBach 11y ago
  I was going to reply, but what you said :P .. I think it's great that initiatives like this are taken, but of course a market fit is important if you want to make a dent.
WA 11y ago
Looks great, but I'll never fork over cash for a service that doesn't even have an imprint. I don't care about ToC, but I want to see that somebody with a name is behind this thing. Edit: Another thing: What about email? The beauty of cPanel and whatnot is that it comes with email to my domain and is usually easy to set up as well.

sokoloff 11y ago

My first question would be: why not just use an S3 bucket directly, with web hosting enabled? http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHostin...

sgallant 11y ago
Yeah, good question. S3 is a hassle for some people (designer-types) and we're building additional services around the hosting part (form submissions, a simple CMS, etc). If you get a chance, try out the demo and let me know what you think. scottgallant[at]gmail
sgarg26 11y ago
It's a good question. Reminds me of the first time I heard about Dropbox - I thought, 'why not just do a rsync'?

gkoberger 11y ago

You might want to charge (a lot) more. How many $1/mo accounts will you need to make any sort of profit?

sgallant 11y ago
Our math tells us that $1/month will result in surprisingly high margins, however, we're hoping to sell services around the hosting of static sites. Need an e-commerce back-end? Premium templates? etc. Did you try the demo? Would you use this kind of thing? Do you find yourself building stupidly simple sites for everyone you know (like I do)?
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  > Our math tells us that $1/month will result in surprisingly high margins What happens when a site uses too much bandwidth for this to hold? The first thing I looked for was information about storage and bandwidth limits, but I don't see that anywhere.
  - sgallant 11y ago
    That's a good point. It's really going to be a game of averages. Most small websites that I build (for restaurants, bands, conversion pages, etc) get a negligible amount of traffic. But every now and then there will be a site that sees 100x that traffic.
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      Or 100000x that traffic. One $1/month site that bursts to unexpectedly excessive bandwidth could wipe out the margins on thousands of such sites. Storage is easy to set limits on in advance, but you're going to want some sensible limits on bandwidth usage too. With some care, you could do so via throttling (fixed average bandwidth with bursting) so that you never need to cut a site off entirely.
  - Nadya 11y ago
    Those are outliers and are rarer than you think. Ask anyone who offers free hosting how many of these large sites they have. Heliohost, as an example, only restricts sites based on CPU Usage. Free hosting of up to 500MB, unlimited bandwidth. But metered CPU Usage. Even then that's hard to hit.
Nadya 11y ago
Hosting is cheap. Especially hosting static sites. For e-commerce (coming soon?), contact forms, and content editing. They charge extra to use their barebones CMS. That's where the real profit will be coming from. $11/yr for a contact form is another $1/month for a very basic service. Content-Editable is another $3~/mo that people would take advantage of (ie: tech user hosting the static site here and handing it off to a non-tech user, rather than having to edit the HTML for any future content edits).

curun1r 11y ago

What about Divshot, BitBalloon, Netlify and Github Pages? Between the 4 of those, there's a range of prices and functionality that fit pretty much any need. Note that the goal of this question is to help you explain what makes you unique, not to as a gotcha. I'd like to get an idea of when your offering is the appropriate choice since I'm looking at needing a static webhost in the next few months.

ChristianBach 11y ago
I was going to reply, but what you said :P .. I think it's great that initiatives like this are taken, but of course a market fit is important if you want to make a dent.

WA 11y ago

Looks great, but I'll never fork over cash for a service that doesn't even have an imprint. I don't care about ToC, but I want to see that somebody with a name is behind this thing. Edit: Another thing: What about email? The beauty of cPanel and whatnot is that it comes with email to my domain and is usually easy to set up as well.