5 ms·

Show HN: Deploy your websites from Dropbox

28 points by minhajuddin 12y ago

minhajuddin 12y ago
Founder here, would love to get feedback
- xSwag 12y ago
  Why a $1 plan? What if that user asks for support, would you value 15 or 30 mins of your time at $1?
  - minhajuddin 12y ago
    I don't foresee a lot of issues once a user gets the hang of it, and I am expecting each user to have approximately 10 websites which should eventually pay off. Hopefully it works out :) I will also increase the amount of documentation/videos which should reduce the support required.
    - wahnfrieden 12y ago
      Nice work! From where do you get that expectation?
      - minhajuddin 12y ago
        Thanks :) I didn't really do any research on that expectation, but from my personal experience many designers can host their clients' websites if they can get an inexpensive and reliable host, websrvr is trying to be that.
- duncanawoods 12y ago
  I deploy a statically generated site by pushing/pulling a production version from git. My feedback is that I don't have any pain points with my current work-flow. I would fear your service & dropbox to actually cause problems and be less useful than git. Sorry to be a downer :) What advantages do you think your service would offer me?
  - minhajuddin 12y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. Do you use github pages? or a server of your own? In the near future I am planning to allow users to host their sites on Amazon S3 and Cloudfront, that should remove the fear of reliability and also be a good feature. I understand that it may not be very appealing to people who can setup their own servers, but I foresee it being useful to many designers.
    - duncanawoods 12y ago
      Ah, I see. I didn't realise you are offering hosting. "Deploy your websites from dropbox." makes me think its just a deployment tool for existing servers. If its for designers, then with a better tag-line, I expect you can make creating a website from a drop-box folder sound like magic.
      - minhajuddin 12y ago
        Thanks, I changed the copy. It sounded better in my head :) btw, the website 'www.websrvr.in' is hosted on the same service :)
- sandyshankar 12y ago
  Some time back, I was in the market for similar sevices, I evaluated brace.io and site44. If I am not wrong, they both charge $5/month for 5 websites. As a user, I would not mind paying that, because if I want to quickly demo to a client, I would prefer a separate sub-domain/folder without having to pull my credit card for that. Second, I was looking for minification and compression, great to see that you have added that feature. Third, great to see that you have contact forms, the first obstacle where you might think of servers. I like brace.io's implementation. Additionally I liked brace.io's admin and shipping workflow. Do you have anything similar?
  - minhajuddin 12y ago
    You don't really have to enter your payment information every time you create a website. Once you signup, you can make a deposit for $3 and we'll charge you only when you create a folder in your dropbox (that too 1 hour after you create the folder in case it was done by a mistake). Also, even if you don't have any funds in your account your websites will be live, we'll send you an email to clear your invoices :) In short, all you have to do to create a website is create a folder with an index.html file. I am also the creator of http://getsimpleform.com http://getsimpleform.com which is a service which allows simple contact forms with akismet integration for spam prevention, it also allows you to use templates for the email notifications on form submissions. websrvr will have all that functionality and a bit more :)
- giovannibajo1 12y ago
  Not sure what's your target, but your pricing plan shows the main differentiator being where the website is hosted (your server vs S3 vs Cloudfront) which requires people to be familiar with AWS services to understand the difference. Then you don't say how your servers are connected to the internet, what uptime they have, etc. My suggestion would be rephrasing without mentioning AWS (unless it's a specific user-level features like "upload to your own S3 bucket" or something like that).
  - minhajuddin 12y ago
    Thanks for the feedback, I'll change the copy hosting it off of S3 or Cloudfront definitely adds to the cost that's why there is a price difference. I should make the text more understandable.
apple314159 12y ago
Not sure what value proposition is here. Static content is well understood. I'm using google storage and it does the job pretty well.
- minhajuddin 12y ago
  It is not to store content but the ability to create new sites just by creating a new folder, e.g. if you create a new folder in 'Dropbox/Apps/websrvr' called 'apple314159' you would have a new website created and online at 'http://apple314159.websrvr.in/' http://apple314159.websrvr.in/' and you could manage your website through your local computer.
  - sethrin 12y ago
    Dropbox doesn't play well with git, or perhaps version control in general. Having a live site which is unversioned is somewhat less than desirable. I am sure there is some category of people for whom this is useful, but I am a professional, which means I have been burned too many times to consider not using version control. Hence, this service is entirely useless to me. Hiding complexity from the user is mostly good; it's a shame that the replication service isn't more capable.
    - minhajuddin 12y ago
      You could still use git to version your website and then websrvr to host your website. I do it for 'http://www.websrvr.in/' http://www.websrvr.in/', you can checkout (https://github.com/websrvr/www.websrvr.in/ https://github.com/websrvr/www.websrvr.in/) for it's source code. I use middleman to build the app and use the "~/Dropbox/Apps/websrvr/wwww" folder as the target folder, it's works out nicely.
    - smt88 12y ago
      I keep about a dozen personal, non-critical projects in Dropbox. All are versioned with git, and it works great. Dropbox itself is versioned (since I'm a paying subscriber), so I have two layers of security there. What negative experiences have you had with Dropbox + VCS?
JoshTheGeek 12y ago
How do you deal with naming conflicts?
- minhajuddin 12y ago
  Great question :) If the folder name 'foobar' is taken, the app renames your folder to 'foobar1a1u20c' where the appended string would make it unique. It's not the most elegant way but it works. Moreover, at the end of the day you would have some CNAME pointing to it, so the name doesn't really matter that much.
bikamonki 12y ago
I build static sites/apps that use saas tools for the dynamic content. For example, a post's comments are stored on parse.com However, this architecture chokes on IE8/7 unless CORS is handled through SSL. How would I install SSL in your service?
- minhajuddin 12y ago
  I have SSL support planned in the near future (1-3 months) if people ask for it. It would require you to upload the private/public keys to websrvr. Thanks for the question :) I was really planning for SSL support because of google's announcement to bump SSL sites in their listings, I wasn't aware of the CORS issues with IE.
mariocesar 12y ago
Just do it your self, https://gist.github.com/mariocesar/3f3e63cd422e1024d7e5 https://gist.github.com/mariocesar/3f3e63cd422e1024d7e5 (If anyone has enhancements please fork or comment) Time before when Canonical announce Ubuntu One was going to be discontinued I comment how I depend on U1 to deploy my static websites, like 30 static websites some of them with simple .php scripts that manage contact forms or feed aggregation, it's pretty easy to do and still don't get why so much people put so much effort on making it a SaaS, we are talking about a little sysadmin work. I have no option that use Dropbox as a backend as most of my clients use it, but it's pretty obvious you can setup the same features with other services.
- minhajuddin 12y ago
  With a SaaS solution you don't have to worry about uptime and having your own server. It's definitely not for every one :)
  - mariocesar 12y ago
    Uptime for an instance that will only serve static content? do we are not just delegating to much? We are talking about a Nginx configuration and a little of sysadmin work.
- hayksaakian 12y ago
  i would love if this was commented through "setup your dns", "add a website" and "share a website" however, thank you for the progress thus far.
bobfunk 12y ago
Founder of BitBalloon (https://www.bitballoon.com https://www.bitballoon.com) here. Always interesting to see more and more startups popping up in the static hosting space. Since we launched a year ago there's been at least 6 other entering the space. Right now it looks like your main selling point is price. Think carefully about whether that's the way you want to go. The real competitors here is the humongous shared hosting market, and the big players there have much deeper pockets and far better economies of scale than any startup. With a $1/site price you'll pretty much never have a chance to make paid advertising a viable customer acquisition channel and as someone else mentioned, think about what the price of giving any kind of support will be. The lower end of the market will (in my experience) also be the place where people will need the most help with stuff like DNS setup, or basic issues such as not having an index.html file, etc, etc. Good luck!
- minhajuddin 12y ago
  Thanks, nice to see you here and thanks for the feedback :)
JacobIrwin 12y ago
Free is cool too! http://www.dropboxwiki.com/tips-and-tricks/host-websites-with-dropbox http://www.dropboxwiki.com/tips-and-tricks/host-websites-wit...
insertnickname 12y ago
Another one...?
amitamb 12y ago
Minor issue but "Edit your files locally to updated the site." should be "Edit your files locally to update the site." One positive point is I got basic idea on what the site is and how to use it in minutes.
- minhajuddin 12y ago
  Thanks, fixed it.
1986v 12y ago
Congratulations on your development. It seems this has been done before, and albeit it is neat what is the benefit over a low-cost "standard" webhost? I can name a few webhosts that are in the $3-5 range and offer standard tools and the ability to install a SSL.
- minhajuddin 12y ago
  The benefit is that you don't have to connect to your webhost over FTP and change files, instead you could just open your file from your dropbox edit it and be done with it. And to create a website all you need to do is create a folder and put your html into it. Thanks for the feedback :) I would love to hear about features which might make you consider this service.
reubano 12y ago
So, is this like using GitHub Pages without having to do a `git push`?
- minhajuddin 12y ago
  Yes, a little bit like that. However, this is part of our core business so I think that gives us a bit of an advantage. For instance, just today we released the ability to minify css/html/js and also gzip it to the highest compression so that websites hosted on websrvr perform better. For www.websrvr.in's homepage I see a decrease in size from 8799 to 2649 bytes which is a decrease in size by 70%.
  - reubano 12y ago
    Gotcha. I use precompilers which take care of file concatenation and minification, but I never could get gzipping to work. Are you targeting devs that probably use github already or not tech folk?
    - minhajuddin 12y ago
      Yeah, I am targeting devs and designers, I used to publish my blog posts using jekyll and git on my own server, and it is a bit tedious to push on every typo correction :)

28 points by minhajuddin 12y ago

minhajuddin 12y ago

Founder here, would love to get feedback

xSwag 12y ago
Why a $1 plan? What if that user asks for support, would you value 15 or 30 mins of your time at $1?
- minhajuddin 12y ago
  I don't foresee a lot of issues once a user gets the hang of it, and I am expecting each user to have approximately 10 websites which should eventually pay off. Hopefully it works out :) I will also increase the amount of documentation/videos which should reduce the support required.
  - wahnfrieden 12y ago
    Nice work! From where do you get that expectation?
    - minhajuddin 12y ago
      Thanks :) I didn't really do any research on that expectation, but from my personal experience many designers can host their clients' websites if they can get an inexpensive and reliable host, websrvr is trying to be that.
duncanawoods 12y ago
I deploy a statically generated site by pushing/pulling a production version from git. My feedback is that I don't have any pain points with my current work-flow. I would fear your service & dropbox to actually cause problems and be less useful than git. Sorry to be a downer :) What advantages do you think your service would offer me?
- minhajuddin 12y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. Do you use github pages? or a server of your own? In the near future I am planning to allow users to host their sites on Amazon S3 and Cloudfront, that should remove the fear of reliability and also be a good feature. I understand that it may not be very appealing to people who can setup their own servers, but I foresee it being useful to many designers.
  - duncanawoods 12y ago
    Ah, I see. I didn't realise you are offering hosting. "Deploy your websites from dropbox." makes me think its just a deployment tool for existing servers. If its for designers, then with a better tag-line, I expect you can make creating a website from a drop-box folder sound like magic.
    - minhajuddin 12y ago
      Thanks, I changed the copy. It sounded better in my head :) btw, the website 'www.websrvr.in' is hosted on the same service :)
sandyshankar 12y ago
Some time back, I was in the market for similar sevices, I evaluated brace.io and site44. If I am not wrong, they both charge $5/month for 5 websites. As a user, I would not mind paying that, because if I want to quickly demo to a client, I would prefer a separate sub-domain/folder without having to pull my credit card for that. Second, I was looking for minification and compression, great to see that you have added that feature. Third, great to see that you have contact forms, the first obstacle where you might think of servers. I like brace.io's implementation. Additionally I liked brace.io's admin and shipping workflow. Do you have anything similar?
- minhajuddin 12y ago
  You don't really have to enter your payment information every time you create a website. Once you signup, you can make a deposit for $3 and we'll charge you only when you create a folder in your dropbox (that too 1 hour after you create the folder in case it was done by a mistake). Also, even if you don't have any funds in your account your websites will be live, we'll send you an email to clear your invoices :) In short, all you have to do to create a website is create a folder with an index.html file. I am also the creator of http://getsimpleform.com http://getsimpleform.com which is a service which allows simple contact forms with akismet integration for spam prevention, it also allows you to use templates for the email notifications on form submissions. websrvr will have all that functionality and a bit more :)
giovannibajo1 12y ago
Not sure what's your target, but your pricing plan shows the main differentiator being where the website is hosted (your server vs S3 vs Cloudfront) which requires people to be familiar with AWS services to understand the difference. Then you don't say how your servers are connected to the internet, what uptime they have, etc. My suggestion would be rephrasing without mentioning AWS (unless it's a specific user-level features like "upload to your own S3 bucket" or something like that).
- minhajuddin 12y ago
  Thanks for the feedback, I'll change the copy hosting it off of S3 or Cloudfront definitely adds to the cost that's why there is a price difference. I should make the text more understandable.

apple314159 12y ago

Not sure what value proposition is here. Static content is well understood. I'm using google storage and it does the job pretty well.

minhajuddin 12y ago
It is not to store content but the ability to create new sites just by creating a new folder, e.g. if you create a new folder in 'Dropbox/Apps/websrvr' called 'apple314159' you would have a new website created and online at 'http://apple314159.websrvr.in/' http://apple314159.websrvr.in/' and you could manage your website through your local computer.
- sethrin 12y ago
  Dropbox doesn't play well with git, or perhaps version control in general. Having a live site which is unversioned is somewhat less than desirable. I am sure there is some category of people for whom this is useful, but I am a professional, which means I have been burned too many times to consider not using version control. Hence, this service is entirely useless to me. Hiding complexity from the user is mostly good; it's a shame that the replication service isn't more capable.
  - minhajuddin 12y ago
    You could still use git to version your website and then websrvr to host your website. I do it for 'http://www.websrvr.in/' http://www.websrvr.in/', you can checkout (https://github.com/websrvr/www.websrvr.in/ https://github.com/websrvr/www.websrvr.in/) for it's source code. I use middleman to build the app and use the "~/Dropbox/Apps/websrvr/wwww" folder as the target folder, it's works out nicely.
  - smt88 12y ago
    I keep about a dozen personal, non-critical projects in Dropbox. All are versioned with git, and it works great. Dropbox itself is versioned (since I'm a paying subscriber), so I have two layers of security there. What negative experiences have you had with Dropbox + VCS?

JoshTheGeek 12y ago

How do you deal with naming conflicts?

minhajuddin 12y ago
Great question :) If the folder name 'foobar' is taken, the app renames your folder to 'foobar1a1u20c' where the appended string would make it unique. It's not the most elegant way but it works. Moreover, at the end of the day you would have some CNAME pointing to it, so the name doesn't really matter that much.

bikamonki 12y ago

I build static sites/apps that use saas tools for the dynamic content. For example, a post's comments are stored on parse.com However, this architecture chokes on IE8/7 unless CORS is handled through SSL. How would I install SSL in your service?

minhajuddin 12y ago
I have SSL support planned in the near future (1-3 months) if people ask for it. It would require you to upload the private/public keys to websrvr. Thanks for the question :) I was really planning for SSL support because of google's announcement to bump SSL sites in their listings, I wasn't aware of the CORS issues with IE.

mariocesar 12y ago

Just do it your self, https://gist.github.com/mariocesar/3f3e63cd422e1024d7e5 https://gist.github.com/mariocesar/3f3e63cd422e1024d7e5 (If anyone has enhancements please fork or comment) Time before when Canonical announce Ubuntu One was going to be discontinued I comment how I depend on U1 to deploy my static websites, like 30 static websites some of them with simple .php scripts that manage contact forms or feed aggregation, it's pretty easy to do and still don't get why so much people put so much effort on making it a SaaS, we are talking about a little sysadmin work. I have no option that use Dropbox as a backend as most of my clients use it, but it's pretty obvious you can setup the same features with other services.

minhajuddin 12y ago
With a SaaS solution you don't have to worry about uptime and having your own server. It's definitely not for every one :)
- mariocesar 12y ago
  Uptime for an instance that will only serve static content? do we are not just delegating to much? We are talking about a Nginx configuration and a little of sysadmin work.
hayksaakian 12y ago
i would love if this was commented through "setup your dns", "add a website" and "share a website" however, thank you for the progress thus far.

bobfunk 12y ago

Founder of BitBalloon (https://www.bitballoon.com https://www.bitballoon.com) here. Always interesting to see more and more startups popping up in the static hosting space. Since we launched a year ago there's been at least 6 other entering the space. Right now it looks like your main selling point is price. Think carefully about whether that's the way you want to go. The real competitors here is the humongous shared hosting market, and the big players there have much deeper pockets and far better economies of scale than any startup. With a $1/site price you'll pretty much never have a chance to make paid advertising a viable customer acquisition channel and as someone else mentioned, think about what the price of giving any kind of support will be. The lower end of the market will (in my experience) also be the place where people will need the most help with stuff like DNS setup, or basic issues such as not having an index.html file, etc, etc. Good luck!

minhajuddin 12y ago
Thanks, nice to see you here and thanks for the feedback :)

JacobIrwin 12y ago

Free is cool too! http://www.dropboxwiki.com/tips-and-tricks/host-websites-with-dropbox http://www.dropboxwiki.com/tips-and-tricks/host-websites-wit...

insertnickname 12y ago

Another one...?

amitamb 12y ago

Minor issue but "Edit your files locally to updated the site." should be "Edit your files locally to update the site." One positive point is I got basic idea on what the site is and how to use it in minutes.

minhajuddin 12y ago
Thanks, fixed it.

1986v 12y ago

Congratulations on your development. It seems this has been done before, and albeit it is neat what is the benefit over a low-cost "standard" webhost? I can name a few webhosts that are in the $3-5 range and offer standard tools and the ability to install a SSL.

minhajuddin 12y ago
The benefit is that you don't have to connect to your webhost over FTP and change files, instead you could just open your file from your dropbox edit it and be done with it. And to create a website all you need to do is create a folder and put your html into it. Thanks for the feedback :) I would love to hear about features which might make you consider this service.

reubano 12y ago

So, is this like using GitHub Pages without having to do a `git push`?

minhajuddin 12y ago
Yes, a little bit like that. However, this is part of our core business so I think that gives us a bit of an advantage. For instance, just today we released the ability to minify css/html/js and also gzip it to the highest compression so that websites hosted on websrvr perform better. For www.websrvr.in's homepage I see a decrease in size from 8799 to 2649 bytes which is a decrease in size by 70%.
- reubano 12y ago
  Gotcha. I use precompilers which take care of file concatenation and minification, but I never could get gzipping to work. Are you targeting devs that probably use github already or not tech folk?
  - minhajuddin 12y ago
    Yeah, I am targeting devs and designers, I used to publish my blog posts using jekyll and git on my own server, and it is a bit tedious to push on every typo correction :)