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Show HN: Static website hosting with auto optimization
- tsukurimashou 7y agoaren't a lot of these things already handled by web servers and browsers? (caching. gzip compression, etc...)
- cvrajeesh 7y agoFounder here, yes caching and gzip is done by web servers. Clodui does much more than that * minification of CSS, JS and HTML * automatic webp image generation, dynamic image resize * and the website is served via CDN, which connects to the nearest CDN server * automatic form handling etc... We're really targeting users with less technical knowledge in server-side but creates awesome websites.
- shakna 7y agowebp isn't supported at all by Safari, on any platform. Is there any kind of intelligent fallback in case you have Apple users?
- cvrajeesh 7y agowe fall back to the original image when webp is not supported by the browser
- shakna 7y agoFallback server-side based on Accepts? Or JS based fallback, or fallback based on user agent, or...? Sorry. There are a lot of ways of doing this, with a lot of services that choose... Interesting... ways of doing it.
- cvrajeesh 7y agoyes, the fallback is done on the server-side based on the accept header
- vegardx 7y agoDoes it really make sense to "minify" everything when you have gzip enabled?
- cvrajeesh 7y agominify saves a few bytes per file but image optimization feature reduces your website size considerably. Usually, people rely on image CDNs to do this, we provide it with hosting service itself.
- cl0rkster 7y agoWorth noting that firebase (Google) provides a similar service. It's entirely free to host static websites. Definitely ends up on a cdn and definitely uses static compression. Ssl certs even get auto handled.
- arkj 7y agoTrue, but I really like the simple click to deploy feature. I can see it will add value to designers who find simple deployments hard.
- ilovenetlify 7y agoLooks like Netlify
- cvrajeesh 7y agoFounder here: I do like Netlify, IMHO it's targeting developer community, I'm targeting users who all are still developing websites in the traditional way.
- l1am0 7y agoLike the idea! But for me I do not see the a benefit over a simple FTP enabled webserver + cloudflare apart from the form submissions. Would you elaborate on that, what makes it worth 5$/month? * Pricing hint: - Go either more expensive with the monthly plan, or cheaper with the yearly. For only 5% off I would not go for the yearly commitment. - Display your yearly price also as 4.74$ & 14.24$ per month instead of the big yearly sum as the big number requires me as customer to pull out my calculator to see the actual saving - Add Call to actions to the pricing boxes e.g. "Signup now for Business plan", even it just redirects to the signup page, it has less friction for me as customer * Other website feedback: - I don't find a imprint. If you control my website, I would like to know who you are. - I assume you are not a native english speaker (me neither), as some sentences sound a bit weird on the site. Maybe get a proofreader. (I do that for my projects and it increases the sites a lot :D) - Especially for the target group you mentioned I think the automatic rollback is a good selling argument. As if you only use e.g. FTP and overwrite files, everyone knows that feeling of accidentally overwritten a wrong file or with an old version. - For being GDPR compliant your privacy policy is not enough - Unlimited Bandwidth could be a bad idea as some high traffic sites could cost you a lot - A SLA would be nice to have, like "99.9% uptime" to know you are trustworthy and my site will not be down for month * Feature ideas: - Automatically add lazy loading for images
- cvrajeesh 7y agoFounder here: the advantages over FTP based approach are - no need to install extract tools and deployments are atomic, so you can rollback instantaneously. Settings up Cloudflare or AWS CloudFront + S3 is easy for users who all familiar with technologies. What I have seen is, there are many web designers out there who design awesome websites but lacks technical knowledge. My brother was like that, he designs websites but I was the one who was helping him to host and write PHP scripts for handling form submissions etc... that's one reason I built a service like this. Thank you for the suggestion on pricing, I'll consider it and update it accordingly. Update: Image lazy loading enabled when website optimization settings is set to "Full"
- monkin 7y ago
- fs2 7y agoLooks interesting, the minification looks like a pretty good selling point. One thing I noticed is the slow connection from Australia, it seems your CDN is limited to Europe and America.
- cvrajeesh 7y agoThank you, I'll check that
- ge0 7y agoWould be nice to know more about the CDN, because after all just two POPs makes a very simple CDN, but a CDN isn't just two POPs!
- cvrajeesh 7y agoFounder here: my entire stack is on AWS. I'm using CloudFront as the CDN
- geocrasher 7y agoI like what you're doing but I have to admit that I am finding a lot of the front page copy to be somewhat awkward: "Clodui automatically minifies all your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, then served in compressed gzip format to further reduce the file size. All the requests served over HTTP/2, which further boosts your website speed." would be much easier to read if it were reworded like so: "Clodui automatically minifies all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. These minified files are then compressed and served over HTTP/2, which further boosts your websites speed." If you want help cleaning up more of it, contact me at my username @ gmail.
- monkin 7y agoIMO all copy should be thrown away as it's aimed for non-technical users. So cut this technical buzzwords and write like for kids. ;)
- lukevp 7y agoAgreed. Something like: “using our Accelerator technology, we take care of optimizing your website with industry-best practices. Your users get fast page speeds, and you can stop worrying and get back to building sites.” Then have a graph of page load times without acceleration and with acceleration and a link for more info for the curious.
- cvrajeesh 7y agoagreed, contents need to be improved. I'm a solo founder working on a shoestring budget. Planning to raise funds and invest more time on improving contents
- monkin 7y agoPro Tip: You can signup for ($99) https://www.gsvlabs.com/passport https://www.gsvlabs.com/passport and get 100k credits for a year on AWS. Product Hunt also have this: https://www.producthunt.com/founder-club/benefits https://www.producthunt.com/founder-club/benefits and https://www.producthunt.com/ship https://www.producthunt.com/ship when you start a business free credits are life saving. :)
- lukevp 7y agoYour app seems geared toward users who are not very technical. I think your pricing structure is too sophisticated. I would include everything in the free plan and the tiers would only be bandwidth usage and form submissions. No one is going to upgrade for robots.txt file support. Even the 30 deploys a month is a lot but it’s psychologically going to feel limiting and decrease signups. They’re gonna upgrade because they need to capture more forms not because of deploy count, that’s just going to upset people. That’s why Netlify has unlimited everything but if you want to capture forms or any other server side processing, you pay. That’s the biggest value add for these services imo.
- cvrajeesh 7y agoThank you, that's a great suggestion. I need to go back to the drawing board and improve pricing based on all the valuable inputs collected from here
- tln 7y agoI agree in general but FYI Netlify's free tier now limits build minutes. It may end up being the lever that gets me to upgrade.
- lukevp 7y agoThat’s interesting, thanks for the update. I think removing build restrictions still applies though. In netlify’s case they are trying to convert their large free base whereas this product is new and needs those free signups for future growth/conversion and I bet the build minutes aren’t going to be a huge cost. I would just throttle heavy users (deprioritize in the queue once you exceed 100 builds in a month or something). I wouldn’t even bother doing this work until/unless it’s a scaling or cost issue though, it may never be and saying the builds are “unlimited*” with some wording that excessive use may be throttled would be enough cya.
- bitten 7y agoNetlify does only has 500 build minutes a month. If you go over, you get charged. Although if your build takes 2 minutes, you can still deploy 250 times per month which is around 8 times a day.. so still very generous. edit: I see somebody beat me to it :)
- _raj9 7y agoReally cool idea ! :)
- tiborsaas 7y agoA few nitpicks: - In the ToS there's no mention of the company I'm making the agreement with - I'd appreciate an about page about who's behind this, but my first point kinda explains it :) - What CDN are you using? Have you built your own?
- cvrajeesh 7y agoThank you, we're using AWS Cloudfront as the CDN. ToS needs to be re-written; currently, I used an online service to generate it :(
- yoran 7y agoJust a small thing: Cloudfront gets very expensive rather quickly. We went to a $4,000 pm to a $20 pm bill by moving our CDN for static assets from Cloudfront to Cloudflare. The only reason we let it come that far is that we had AWS credits. But as soon as we neared the end of the credits, we made the switch to Cloudflare.
- cvrajeesh 7y agoThank you for the heads-up
- wenc 7y agoJust curious: how is "clodui" pronounced? At first I read Cloud UI, but after pausing a little I realized it was not Cloud UI. I mention this because I think names matter for word-of-mouth recommendation. In many interviews, Morgan Freeman would recount that The Shawshank Redemption bombed at the box-office because back in the day word-of-mouth was still dominant way of getting movie recommendations, and people couldn't say or remember the word "Shawshank".
- cvrajeesh 7y agoFounder here: I'm pronouncing it as "clod ui". The name came from the word "Cloud" + "UI" and removed "u" from Cloud so the domain is available.
- SneezyRobot 7y agoHi Cvrajeesh, congrats on launching! It's a big achievement to get your project out the door and in customer's hands. We launched a very similar service (fast.io) a few months ago and have found some good interest in the product. Unfortunately, however, there are many other good solutions for simple deployments and performant static hosting. My question for you would be, what are you doing that solves your customer's problem so much better than competitors that they'd be willing to put their mission-critical website on your (unproven) service over anyone else's? For these simple use-cases (the ones you appear to be targeting) most users just aren't willing to pay. The more sophisticated users who are running businesses (and would pay) often need more features and greater control over their hosting solution - features that will take you a long time to build out and prove in the market. As such, we're working on a product pivot that's educated by the insights we've gained through our initial launch. We don't want to go head-on with other products that are, quite frankly, doing a great job in this market already. I'll be really curious to see/hear if you encounter similar challenges and how you navigate them.
- ruttle 7y ago> We launched a very similar service I haven't seen them post to a Show HN to shamelessly promote and link to their own rival version, so that's one difference.
- SneezyRobot 7y agoI can see how you might think that, but to be more clear we are moving out of this market - I'm trying to be helpful to the OP (and anyone else who's looking at this market) by sharing our experience. A Google search is going to yield a lot of great other companies for static hosting like https://netlify.com https://netlify.com (which even supports this exact functionality of drag and drop uploads) and https://zeit.co https://zeit.co just to name a couple, not to mention a graveyard of other services who've tried to do similar things over the last 5 years. You might even notice that we've changed our messaging to focus on file-sharing and direct links - not website hosting.
- vorpalhex 7y agoWoof, expensive. This might be worth it if there's live support included and a really easy control panel, but otherwise a similar setup is $60/year. The image resizing and optimization is a good sell, but it's dramatically more expensive to have it when under the hood it's a relatively cheap feature aside from initial build out, and it's available in basic form for free on places like Netlify.
- jiy2020 7y agoWow !! This is a great piece of work. Hassle-free hosting and automatic optimization
- chrisked 7y agoWanted to read about forms in your docs. Page does not exist : https://www.clodui.com/form/add-form https://www.clodui.com/form/add-form
- cvrajeesh 7y agothis is the correct URL https://www.clodui.com/docs/form/add-form https://www.clodui.com/docs/form/add-form
- tuananh 7y agothat's just cloudflare. they are doing all of those.