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Why? Honestly, how can you "outsource" such a vital part of your web app to a third party? Not only is this a privacy disaster but also, if this user service go
by WA 13y ago
Why? Honestly, how can you "outsource" such a vital part of your web app to a third party? Not only is this a privacy disaster but also, if this user service goes down or has a temporary downtime, your own business is effectively unusable.
I understand that it makes sense to not write these types of user functions and management things over and over again. The solution however, is not a SaaS, but a library or a little framework. And from what I remember, major Web development frameworks offer exactly these types of functionality.
I don't want to be a downer and you guys probably spend a lot of time on the product, but from my perspective, any business owner using a third party to handle user data acts irresponsibly. You OWE it to your users to keep their data as tight and as centralized in one spot as possible – a spot only you and employees have access to and servers only you rented and have access to and not a third party.
I'd even rather use Wordpress as a basic user management platform than use a third party service. This way, it is at least fully under my control and I'm the only one responsible if things get broken or data gets stolen.
- typerandom 13y agoOP here. Exactly because of this reason, you should use us. We have built a low-latency HA platform. And it's our core business. This means that we will do it the best way possible. I can understand your concerns, but you could try us out on a smaller project to begin with. Or wait until we launch our licensed version which will allow you to install the system in your own environment. I.e. keeping the data safe with you and under your control :) But it might cost a little bit more than $9 :)
- CaveTech 13y agoBeing marketed as a HA management platform doesn't really help me... If my server isn't stable enough to handle user management, it sure isn't stable enough to handle my actual service.
- druiid 13y agoHonestly HA doesn't really tell anyone anything about what would be my bigger concern... security of the platform. What kinds of IDS solution do you currently have in place for starters? Are you using a software or hardware IDS? How are you doing monitoring of the IDS logs and reporting? Have you done penetration tests beyond some sort of SaaS utility and hired a third party company to run them with a skilled analyst? How are you sanitizing input from external applications as you have to assume the incoming requests are suspect, etc.
- UK-AL 13y agoYou could say that about ANY cloud product though.
- chrismonsanto 13y agoYes, you could. If it's apart of my service, I want it on my servers.
- nmcfarl 13y agoWhich is an expensive way to run a company. Very few startup start with their own server rooms, because part of the "failing fast" is failing cheap. And if you are making infrastructure investments before you find product market fit - well you aren't failing cheap. I do think there is inherent value in controlling your whole stack, and running all things on your own servers, but I think this is a bit of a luxury most young companies can't afford.
- chrismonsanto 13y agoI don't know anything about 'failing fast' or other startup methodologies (I'm here for the hacker part of this community, not the startup part). Is this product designed specifically for startups? Is it intended to be removed later when you have 'found product market fit'? Isn't it more expensive to be locked in to this platform, which you don't have the source to, and can't modify if it doesn't 100% meet your needs?
- UK-AL 13y ago" can't modify if it doesn't 100% meet your needs?" And its even more expensive to spend developer time doing it, then finding out no one wants your product. That's what meant by failing fast. Find a quick way to validate your product in the market, then fail. Don't spend ages working on a product that will never work.
- jonahx 13y agoI don't understand this comment. On digitalocean you can get 4G RAM for 40/month, 8G for 80. Running nginx and your favorite backend of choice, you will be able to handle any traffic your startup is getting. If you can't, you are already so successful that paying more won't matter....
- aytekin 13y agoOne possible use case: Let's say you are building a new app and you don't know if it will be successful. At this point you are supposed to be working on the core. You are supposed to be talking with the users as soon as possible. You are not supposed to spend your time on things that don't matter such as registration, email delivery, forgot password. If the app becomes successful you can always implement these things in house later.
- camus 13y agoPlease , in every languages there are a tons of libraries dealing with these stuffs, Starter projects with these functionalities ... At this point you are supposed to be working on the core
- UK-AL 13y agoInvoicing, Price Plans and Payment. These are not normally built in. Basic user management is, but not those things.
- adrinavarro 13y agoRight. So instead of working in creating a user system, you integrate your core to another system. Or you could, well, let's say, use a library or framework and spare you the work of integration too!
- jumpbug 13y agoI don't have a dog in this fight, but sometimes, companies are left with no other solutions. We had some websites hosted with Wordpress VIP. Because of their full page caching and just general restrictions, creating a login and user registration system like we wanted was not possible. We had to use a 3rd party hosted solutions that loaded with javascript(we used Gigya). Before that, I thought exactly as you do. There is a reason Gigya just raised 25mm more dollars. Granted, they do more than just user login as a service.
- sologoub 13y agoGigya looks to be a lot closer to a DMP in an advertising world than a SaaS login service. They help getting visitors to identify themselves, that's a completely different positioning and feature set. Knowing my audience and being able to monetize that is not the same as managing billing. That said, it does sound kind of interesting, but from my own experience, I'd probably choose to build payments and billing myself.
- read 13y agoGreat job guys! I have a feature request: is it possible to also save private keys through your service? I would like to run Javascript on the client that gets a user's private key from you, and decrypts their data on the client. Do you have thoughts for something like this?
- bmillipede 13y agoBecause we need can spend that energy on product development. Once your product takes off, we can migrate. But a service such as this (I use dailycred.com ) is very useful for MVPs.
- 7952 13y agoI do see the appeal of this kind of service. I understand enough about security to know that it is diffiult to get right. The library approach that I have tried with things like django etc. tend to need plugins for a lot of use cases, and I do not understand what pieces of code are intereactig with each other which is a big red flag. More complex SSO systems seem massively overcomplicated and difficult to configure. I want something with the simplicity and definitiveness of an apache htpasswd file with a freindly user interface and assurances about security/hashing etc.
- mehdim 13y agoThis is why OAuth.io is open source, and you can choose to have a commercial license if you want to avoid GPL.