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I went on your page, and it looks like I am your target audience - relatively tech savvy, want to ungoogle myself, ready to pay for convenience of doing so, yet

I went on your page, and it looks like I am your target audience - relatively tech savvy, want to ungoogle myself, ready to pay for convenience of doing so, yet I got confused quickly. 1. What do you sell? Hardware or some kind of management software? Looks like latter, then why there is image of PiBox all over the page? 2. What is cluster? Is it a single PiBox/another Linux or something more? Word "cluster" implies to me there are many somethings grouped, what are these somethings? 3. Price plans mention proxied traffic. What it is and how does it fit into big picture? 4. I signed up, clicked add cluster -> "Bring YourOwn" and nothing changes, it still offers me to buy PiBox with shipping date in July(!! I know it's not your fault, but damn). How do I add my own "cluster" (whatever it is)? 5. Once logged in, I can't get to the homepage anymore, it is all dashboard now.

zild3d 5y ago
> Once logged in, I can't get to the homepage anymore, it is all dashboard now. a lot of sites do this, see github.com (I'm not a fan of the pattern)
erulabs 5y ago
Hi! Thanks for your feedback! 1. We sell both hardware and software, although our software works with almost any computer that runs Linux - it doesn't require our hardware and can run on anything that can run Kubernetes. Obviously, this is somewhat "the deep end" for many users, so our PiBox comes plug-n-play ready. 2. Cluster is a Kubernetes term, which we really should stop using, although we have a core value of educating instead of shielding our users - so we've tried to keep the "upstream" terminology as much as we can. It simply means "one or more Linux servers". Most of our customers simply run one machine as their "cluster", but a small handful have dozens of machines in the same group. 3. We're trying to bundle everything that's needed to host apps and websites at home. For most users, home internet connections aren't very good for this - the IP address changes often, and sometimes ISPs do not even allow port 80 or 443 to be exposed to the internet - we solve this by proxying traffic directly to your cluster, bypassing firewalls and avoiding the need for port-forwarding, router configuration, etc. This means you can plug in a PiBox, install, say, PhotoStructure, and access `photos.home.erulabs.k8g8.com` (for example), without needing to know anything at all about networking or firewalls or DNS. We also offer backups, as another example of trying to make home-hosting "complete". 4. Ack! I broke this last night! Thank you for pointing that out, fixed now! 5. You can click "home" in the footer, but yes, some polish there would be nice... One day we'll hire a proper designer ;) Thank you for the feedback, very much appreciated.
- PKop 5y ago
  >"We're trying to bundle everything that's needed to host apps and websites at home." This should be written somewhere on your website. A good simple use-case description like this cuts through some of the jargon to quickly explain what is is you're actually helping a user to do apart from describing features and technical ways you enable them to do actually do that thing. edit: so this is on the site, but I had to scroll down further. I'd highly suggest moving the "What would you say you do here" at least to the top of the black box it is in, if not the top of the page. It is much more informative, while the other paragraphs are more confusing to read first, I left the page without scrolling down further.

zild3d 5y ago

> Once logged in, I can't get to the homepage anymore, it is all dashboard now. a lot of sites do this, see github.com (I'm not a fan of the pattern)

erulabs 5y ago

Hi! Thanks for your feedback! 1. We sell both hardware and software, although our software works with almost any computer that runs Linux - it doesn't require our hardware and can run on anything that can run Kubernetes. Obviously, this is somewhat "the deep end" for many users, so our PiBox comes plug-n-play ready. 2. Cluster is a Kubernetes term, which we really should stop using, although we have a core value of educating instead of shielding our users - so we've tried to keep the "upstream" terminology as much as we can. It simply means "one or more Linux servers". Most of our customers simply run one machine as their "cluster", but a small handful have dozens of machines in the same group. 3. We're trying to bundle everything that's needed to host apps and websites at home. For most users, home internet connections aren't very good for this - the IP address changes often, and sometimes ISPs do not even allow port 80 or 443 to be exposed to the internet - we solve this by proxying traffic directly to your cluster, bypassing firewalls and avoiding the need for port-forwarding, router configuration, etc. This means you can plug in a PiBox, install, say, PhotoStructure, and access `photos.home.erulabs.k8g8.com` (for example), without needing to know anything at all about networking or firewalls or DNS. We also offer backups, as another example of trying to make home-hosting "complete". 4. Ack! I broke this last night! Thank you for pointing that out, fixed now! 5. You can click "home" in the footer, but yes, some polish there would be nice... One day we'll hire a proper designer ;) Thank you for the feedback, very much appreciated.

PKop 5y ago
>"We're trying to bundle everything that's needed to host apps and websites at home." This should be written somewhere on your website. A good simple use-case description like this cuts through some of the jargon to quickly explain what is is you're actually helping a user to do apart from describing features and technical ways you enable them to do actually do that thing. edit: so this is on the site, but I had to scroll down further. I'd highly suggest moving the "What would you say you do here" at least to the top of the black box it is in, if not the top of the page. It is much more informative, while the other paragraphs are more confusing to read first, I left the page without scrolling down further.