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Is "self hosted" considered a positive or negative these days? It seems like there is a small niche that still wants control over their data but everyone else s

Is "self hosted" considered a positive or negative these days? It seems like there is a small niche that still wants control over their data but everyone else seems ok with the cloud.

daigoba66 12y ago
I consider it a plus. If I were developing a product like this, I'd build it for self hosting and charge a nominal cost plus yearly a maintenance/support subscription. Then you could deploy the same product yourself and offer it "as a service" for a monthly subscription. Atlassian does this for many of their products.
- johnward 12y ago
  I skipped over the free part too. Makes sense to be free and self hosted but this would also be cool as a "deploy to heroku" (or whatever cloud PaaS provider officially supports php). I still wonder if the creator has plans to monetize it?
- johnward 12y ago
  Also as for the business model you've mentioned. I've seen this done in competitive spaces like affiliate marketing. If you don't know most affiliates are super paranoid about thier data as leaking info about a campaign can lead to tons of copies and there goes your revenue. They seem to mostly prefer self hosted apps. Imobitrax offers a self hosted paid tracking system with a monthly fee. A lot of people used to use the free prosper202 self hosted tracking system too. Now recently I'm seeing a shift where people are not afraid to use cloud systems like voluum. I'm not sure what is causing the acceptance to change. It could just be that everything is cloud hosted now so people are getting used to the idea. The problem I see with paid self hosted PHP apps, in this case, is that they are often using ioncube obfuscation and then if I can't read the source how do I know my data is more secure than a cloud provider?
23andwalnut 12y ago
I built a similar project management app (http://duetapp.com http://duetapp.com) and people love the fact that it's self hosted. This segment of the market is definitely smaller than the segment that prefers SaaS, but it's bigger than you might imagine.
- michelutti 12y ago
  Hey! I have always one doubt about this type of product (pay once). How do you distribute your source font, as well the installer to your customer? Do you use another software for a restricted area to download? Or is the download open to anyone, but you have to offer a license key to run the app?
  - 23andwalnut 12y ago
    The app is distributed as a single zip, but the installer requires a license key. Updates are distributed through the duetapp website, which also requires a license key before the update is delivered.
    - michelutti 12y ago
      Nice! But is it secure? As the customer already have the source code, what stops him to change the license code? I mean, if the source code is available, I can install it by myself without using the installer.
      - johnward 12y ago
        I know a lot of PHP projects that do this use IONcube loader and mcrypt. So you get the source but it's encrypted.
- marveller 12y ago
  Nice app. Just a question about "Free updates for a year", what's the cost after a year?
ProAm 12y ago
It's definitely a positive, especially for enterprise. The cloud for enterprise means your' depending on people who dont know to do a good job, and it means you spend 3x as much time communicating vs getting work done.
- johnward 12y ago
  I don't know. I work for an enterprise company and we're coming around to the idea of putting things in the cloud. I actually think the people running cloud hosted software are more of an expert in the software and devops than the people inside your organization in a lot of cases. Plus large enterprises have so much bloat that it can be way more expensive and time consuming to launch something internally. The biggest issue seems to be that these companies are still afraid of who controls their data.
  - ProAm 12y ago
    Sometimes. All I can speak about is my personal experiences with a handful of enterprise customers and the times we moved things to the cloud. Communication is always an issue, we find that instead of spending time in house developing, deploying, administering, etc... we spend that same amount of time either one the phone or writing emails and documentation on what we need or what is wrong or what we need done. We also find that the what the cloud team finds as a sufficient level of quality or service often does not match what we require or expect. And fixing that is a major PITA because it comes down to culture, and suddenly you are not dealing with your company's culture but a 'cloud' culture. And on top of all that there is the issue of who controls your data. Is it secure? is it safe? What's your uptime, downtime, maintenance? Often we get promised good things (sales people are good at what they do), but it rarely works out as such. The answer to this is find another cloud provider, but I dont want to spend months RFI, RFP, migration, integration, etc....again because the first cloud people were terrible. It's often just better in the long term to do it yourself. It's a pay me now or pay me later scenario and I'll live by the words if you want something done right, do it yourself, especially for enterprise.
    - stephenr 12y ago
stephenr 12y ago
While some people will seemingly climb over their own mother in their rush to hand over their personal and business data to every man and his dog, some of us still have our sanity. Having it available as self hosted doesn't exclude the possibility that the author or another company will offer it as a service. The reverse is often not true.
michaelmior 12y ago
The terminology is perhaps a little messy, but I think "self hosted" and "in the cloud" are not necessarily mutually exclusive. On one hand, "in the cloud" can mean a SaaS platform where your data is locked in and you have no control over the application. However, I could also own the code and data and host an application myself "in the cloud." This is the ideal compromise to me. I can own my data and the application, but I don't necessarily have to deal with all the annoying details of managing my own servers.
- johnward 12y ago
  Yeah when I said "cloud" I really meant SaaS. You can certainly deploy a self hosted app to a "cloud" PaaS and get a greater ability to control your data than SaaS while still getting many of the other benefits a SaaS service offers.
drewcrawford 12y ago
I'm working on a self-hosted product. My market research suggests that the market for hosted products is much larger but the market for self-hosted products these days is underserved. There are people who for various reasons refuse to use any hosted product (legal issue, boss said no, etc.) and depending on the competitive landscape they may not have any other options than buying your product. This produces a captive audience.
imdsm 12y ago
Offer self-hosting for a single fee (or for free), and offer hosted for a monthly price. That seems to be the trend.

Is "self hosted" considered a positive or negative these days? It seems like there is a small niche that still wants control over their data but everyone else seems ok with the cloud.

daigoba66 12y ago

I consider it a plus. If I were developing a product like this, I'd build it for self hosting and charge a nominal cost plus yearly a maintenance/support subscription. Then you could deploy the same product yourself and offer it "as a service" for a monthly subscription. Atlassian does this for many of their products.

johnward 12y ago
I skipped over the free part too. Makes sense to be free and self hosted but this would also be cool as a "deploy to heroku" (or whatever cloud PaaS provider officially supports php). I still wonder if the creator has plans to monetize it?
johnward 12y ago
Also as for the business model you've mentioned. I've seen this done in competitive spaces like affiliate marketing. If you don't know most affiliates are super paranoid about thier data as leaking info about a campaign can lead to tons of copies and there goes your revenue. They seem to mostly prefer self hosted apps. Imobitrax offers a self hosted paid tracking system with a monthly fee. A lot of people used to use the free prosper202 self hosted tracking system too. Now recently I'm seeing a shift where people are not afraid to use cloud systems like voluum. I'm not sure what is causing the acceptance to change. It could just be that everything is cloud hosted now so people are getting used to the idea. The problem I see with paid self hosted PHP apps, in this case, is that they are often using ioncube obfuscation and then if I can't read the source how do I know my data is more secure than a cloud provider?

23andwalnut 12y ago

I built a similar project management app (http://duetapp.com http://duetapp.com) and people love the fact that it's self hosted. This segment of the market is definitely smaller than the segment that prefers SaaS, but it's bigger than you might imagine.

michelutti 12y ago
Hey! I have always one doubt about this type of product (pay once). How do you distribute your source font, as well the installer to your customer? Do you use another software for a restricted area to download? Or is the download open to anyone, but you have to offer a license key to run the app?
- 23andwalnut 12y ago
  The app is distributed as a single zip, but the installer requires a license key. Updates are distributed through the duetapp website, which also requires a license key before the update is delivered.
  - michelutti 12y ago
    Nice! But is it secure? As the customer already have the source code, what stops him to change the license code? I mean, if the source code is available, I can install it by myself without using the installer.
    - johnward 12y ago
      I know a lot of PHP projects that do this use IONcube loader and mcrypt. So you get the source but it's encrypted.
marveller 12y ago
Nice app. Just a question about "Free updates for a year", what's the cost after a year?

ProAm 12y ago

It's definitely a positive, especially for enterprise. The cloud for enterprise means your' depending on people who dont know to do a good job, and it means you spend 3x as much time communicating vs getting work done.

johnward 12y ago
I don't know. I work for an enterprise company and we're coming around to the idea of putting things in the cloud. I actually think the people running cloud hosted software are more of an expert in the software and devops than the people inside your organization in a lot of cases. Plus large enterprises have so much bloat that it can be way more expensive and time consuming to launch something internally. The biggest issue seems to be that these companies are still afraid of who controls their data.
- ProAm 12y ago
  Sometimes. All I can speak about is my personal experiences with a handful of enterprise customers and the times we moved things to the cloud. Communication is always an issue, we find that instead of spending time in house developing, deploying, administering, etc... we spend that same amount of time either one the phone or writing emails and documentation on what we need or what is wrong or what we need done. We also find that the what the cloud team finds as a sufficient level of quality or service often does not match what we require or expect. And fixing that is a major PITA because it comes down to culture, and suddenly you are not dealing with your company's culture but a 'cloud' culture. And on top of all that there is the issue of who controls your data. Is it secure? is it safe? What's your uptime, downtime, maintenance? Often we get promised good things (sales people are good at what they do), but it rarely works out as such. The answer to this is find another cloud provider, but I dont want to spend months RFI, RFP, migration, integration, etc....again because the first cloud people were terrible. It's often just better in the long term to do it yourself. It's a pay me now or pay me later scenario and I'll live by the words if you want something done right, do it yourself, especially for enterprise.
  - stephenr 12y ago

stephenr 12y ago

While some people will seemingly climb over their own mother in their rush to hand over their personal and business data to every man and his dog, some of us still have our sanity. Having it available as self hosted doesn't exclude the possibility that the author or another company will offer it as a service. The reverse is often not true.

michaelmior 12y ago

The terminology is perhaps a little messy, but I think "self hosted" and "in the cloud" are not necessarily mutually exclusive. On one hand, "in the cloud" can mean a SaaS platform where your data is locked in and you have no control over the application. However, I could also own the code and data and host an application myself "in the cloud." This is the ideal compromise to me. I can own my data and the application, but I don't necessarily have to deal with all the annoying details of managing my own servers.

johnward 12y ago
Yeah when I said "cloud" I really meant SaaS. You can certainly deploy a self hosted app to a "cloud" PaaS and get a greater ability to control your data than SaaS while still getting many of the other benefits a SaaS service offers.

drewcrawford 12y ago

I'm working on a self-hosted product. My market research suggests that the market for hosted products is much larger but the market for self-hosted products these days is underserved. There are people who for various reasons refuse to use any hosted product (legal issue, boss said no, etc.) and depending on the competitive landscape they may not have any other options than buying your product. This produces a captive audience.

imdsm 12y ago

Offer self-hosting for a single fee (or for free), and offer hosted for a monthly price. That seems to be the trend.