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For those in the market to run a private cloud, please try https://cloudron.io https://cloudron.io . Our motivation is to make it simple to selfhost apps . The

For those in the market to run a private cloud, please try https://cloudron.io https://cloudron.io . Our motivation is to make it simple to selfhost apps . The main advantage is that we take care of automatic updates across all the apps we package. Happy to answer any questions. Disclaimer: I am the co-founder

jlgaddis 7y ago
Is it really self-hosting if you're running it on someone's cloud?
- wpietri 7y ago
  Definitely. I mean, you could play an infinite regress game. Do you own the hardware? Do you own the cage the hardware is in? Do you own the building that the cage is in, and the land that the building is on? And then we can go toward owning the power company and the connections to anybody your servers talk to. But in practice, self-hosting is about control. If what you're running it on is a commodity cloud instance that you could get from a half-dozen providers, then any one cloud provider has very little leverage over you.
  - Tepix 7y ago
    No. If you have dedicated hardware (rented or owned) and full disk encryption you have decent control over your data. On a virtual server you have no control and no privacy.
    - wpietri 7y ago
      Depends on what you mean by control. It sounds like you're worried about different downside risks than I am.
- gramakri 7y ago
  I think like many other terms like 'cloud', 'private', 'start up' there is a lot of gray area :). It's up to you where you draw the line. For me, self-hosting means running software in a manner where I have control of the data/application code and the server. With that definition, running software on EC2/DO/Linode is self-hosting. When I self-host using these servers, I know what the server is running and where the data resides. Also, I think there are other similar popular terms. For those who run in their own premises, the term is on-premise. For those running it home, usually they call it home lab/NAS/home server. Self-hosting to me encompasses all this. Also, self-hosting doesn't necessarily mean just open source. There are some amazing closed apps out there that you can self-host - emby, confluence, teamspeak to name a few. Two of my favorite spots - https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted and https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    I think it's also important to highlight that perfect is the enemy of good. I moved from Google services (A) to an open source platform... that I was paying them to host on Google Cloud (B). Sure, it's still at Google, but the ability for Google to mine data from it is significantly reduced. Of course, later, I moved to hosting it in-house (C), where I have direct physical control. It's likely if my choices were A or C, I'd have never left A. But that B option eased the transition for me, and made it possible for me to get to the point I felt like the investment was worth it to create a fully on-premise solution. There's a part D to this too, actually: I'm still using a service to manage the DNS and TLS for it. Eventually I should be able to move away from that too. But without the intermediate step, it'd be too prohibitive and frustrating to have moved to step C.
    - gramakri 7y ago
      Great point about D. I self-host at home (it's a thinkcenter m600) but it depends on external services. I use DO DNS and Let's Encrypt TLS, backup to S3. Not to mention I rely on comcast for internet and public IP!
solarkraft 7y ago
Interesting stack. From a first glance it seems to be a bunch of self-made Dockerfiles with an extra manifest. I like the idea, but wouldn't want anything proprietary for this relatively simple task. I suppose this product isn't for me anyway, since eventually (not that long ago) I just bit the bullet and learned the basics of Docker and docker-compose. It's not that hard, costs nothing and is pretty rewarding, imo.
- gramakri 7y ago
  Yes, that's the core of our tech stack. All our packages are opensource (git.cloudron.io). Important thing for us is to have all the docker containers read-only and have a 100% reliable backup/restore mechanism because we do automatic updates for apps to give a SaaS experience to self-hosting. We also provide SSO for users across apps (so you can add your family or colleagues in a cloudron and do access control across apps easily).
zapt02 7y ago
For anyone looking for a free alternative to this, check out: https://caprover.com/ https://caprover.com/ It has many of the same apps as Cloudron and is completely free. And you can of course host your own Dockerfiles on top of it. I think the pricing for Cloudron is way off. I'm not going to spend 5 dollars per month for a DigitalOcean droplet and then 30 dollars per month to host a few open-source apps on that Droplet. Especially since CapRover does 99% of this for free.
- gramakri 7y ago
  The target audience of caprover and cloudron is totally different. caprover is a PaaS. Cloudron lets you install ready to use apps like Ghost/GitLab/Discourse/OpenVPN etc. A person who knows how to deploy using docker and more importantly has the time to setup stuff securely, does not need either of these tools. Even there, people will argue why you need docker and why you cannot run with LXC. This goes as deep as you want to go :) As for the pricing, agreed that it might be out of reach for personal use. I think it really depends on what you get out of the product. Our target at the moment is primarily family/small businesses/IT teams. For example, a business runs website/file sharing/mail/chat/analytics/crm/forum on a droplet. The server would be around 20/month (4GB server) and then 30 on top of it. For personal use, all my stuff is on Cloudron (calendar/contacts/email/blogs/website/rss/media/docs/notes). I cannot imagine relying on a product which is 5/month for all my stuff. Besides, having complete control and owning your data is priceless. If you don't value that, I am not sure why one would self-host at all.

jlgaddis 7y ago

Is it really self-hosting if you're running it on someone's cloud?

wpietri 7y ago
Definitely. I mean, you could play an infinite regress game. Do you own the hardware? Do you own the cage the hardware is in? Do you own the building that the cage is in, and the land that the building is on? And then we can go toward owning the power company and the connections to anybody your servers talk to. But in practice, self-hosting is about control. If what you're running it on is a commodity cloud instance that you could get from a half-dozen providers, then any one cloud provider has very little leverage over you.
- Tepix 7y ago
  No. If you have dedicated hardware (rented or owned) and full disk encryption you have decent control over your data. On a virtual server you have no control and no privacy.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    Depends on what you mean by control. It sounds like you're worried about different downside risks than I am.
gramakri 7y ago
I think like many other terms like 'cloud', 'private', 'start up' there is a lot of gray area :). It's up to you where you draw the line. For me, self-hosting means running software in a manner where I have control of the data/application code and the server. With that definition, running software on EC2/DO/Linode is self-hosting. When I self-host using these servers, I know what the server is running and where the data resides. Also, I think there are other similar popular terms. For those who run in their own premises, the term is on-premise. For those running it home, usually they call it home lab/NAS/home server. Self-hosting to me encompasses all this. Also, self-hosting doesn't necessarily mean just open source. There are some amazing closed apps out there that you can self-host - emby, confluence, teamspeak to name a few. Two of my favorite spots - https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted and https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  I think it's also important to highlight that perfect is the enemy of good. I moved from Google services (A) to an open source platform... that I was paying them to host on Google Cloud (B). Sure, it's still at Google, but the ability for Google to mine data from it is significantly reduced. Of course, later, I moved to hosting it in-house (C), where I have direct physical control. It's likely if my choices were A or C, I'd have never left A. But that B option eased the transition for me, and made it possible for me to get to the point I felt like the investment was worth it to create a fully on-premise solution. There's a part D to this too, actually: I'm still using a service to manage the DNS and TLS for it. Eventually I should be able to move away from that too. But without the intermediate step, it'd be too prohibitive and frustrating to have moved to step C.
  - gramakri 7y ago
    Great point about D. I self-host at home (it's a thinkcenter m600) but it depends on external services. I use DO DNS and Let's Encrypt TLS, backup to S3. Not to mention I rely on comcast for internet and public IP!

solarkraft 7y ago

Interesting stack. From a first glance it seems to be a bunch of self-made Dockerfiles with an extra manifest. I like the idea, but wouldn't want anything proprietary for this relatively simple task. I suppose this product isn't for me anyway, since eventually (not that long ago) I just bit the bullet and learned the basics of Docker and docker-compose. It's not that hard, costs nothing and is pretty rewarding, imo.

gramakri 7y ago
Yes, that's the core of our tech stack. All our packages are opensource (git.cloudron.io). Important thing for us is to have all the docker containers read-only and have a 100% reliable backup/restore mechanism because we do automatic updates for apps to give a SaaS experience to self-hosting. We also provide SSO for users across apps (so you can add your family or colleagues in a cloudron and do access control across apps easily).

zapt02 7y ago

For anyone looking for a free alternative to this, check out: https://caprover.com/ https://caprover.com/ It has many of the same apps as Cloudron and is completely free. And you can of course host your own Dockerfiles on top of it. I think the pricing for Cloudron is way off. I'm not going to spend 5 dollars per month for a DigitalOcean droplet and then 30 dollars per month to host a few open-source apps on that Droplet. Especially since CapRover does 99% of this for free.

gramakri 7y ago
The target audience of caprover and cloudron is totally different. caprover is a PaaS. Cloudron lets you install ready to use apps like Ghost/GitLab/Discourse/OpenVPN etc. A person who knows how to deploy using docker and more importantly has the time to setup stuff securely, does not need either of these tools. Even there, people will argue why you need docker and why you cannot run with LXC. This goes as deep as you want to go :) As for the pricing, agreed that it might be out of reach for personal use. I think it really depends on what you get out of the product. Our target at the moment is primarily family/small businesses/IT teams. For example, a business runs website/file sharing/mail/chat/analytics/crm/forum on a droplet. The server would be around 20/month (4GB server) and then 30 on top of it. For personal use, all my stuff is on Cloudron (calendar/contacts/email/blogs/website/rss/media/docs/notes). I cannot imagine relying on a product which is 5/month for all my stuff. Besides, having complete control and owning your data is priceless. If you don't value that, I am not sure why one would self-host at all.