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Comment by dublinben | Hacker News Reader

This just looks like expensive managed hosting. It's still just cloud hosting on someone else's hardware.

For truly personal 'cloud' apps, I recommend projects like Freedombox or Sandstorm. They make it this easy to deploy cloud apps on hardware you actually physically own and control.

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IMO people who aren't political dissidents are generally better served by renting reliable resources in a datacenter with good bandwidth than running flaky hardware in their home off their broadband. Fortunately the sticker shock of a $200 box vs. $10/month will mostly take care of this issue.

I think this is much easier for the average consumer. Reminds me of the old "virtual hosting" platforms that made it easy enough for your grandma to set up & maintain a website. I like it.

People are quick to condemn GeoCities, but it was a pretty fantastic thing for the world, when you get right down to it. I'm excited to see lots of providers looking at doing similar things for the modern web.

We're trying to make it as close to self-managed as a sysadmin running their own machine in a colo. We're not there yet but that's where we're headed. Sandstorm is working on a hosting service as well.

The only way you can truly control a server, as an individual, is by running it out of your home. The problem with servers at home is that most residential internet is terrible for running servers on.

You can have locked cage space leased from a datacenter if you want to be in control of all the things you have any business being in control of.

That, however, is prohibitively expensive for small scale users though. Even moreso than running a box from home.

I did a quick comparison with DigitalOcean, and it looks like equal (obviously, with more features). What's cheaper cloud hosting than DO (that's not crap)?

Vultr:

https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

The big difference is that with Portal you can run 8 x 128 MB (or 4 x 256 MB) VMs within a single 1 GB memory plan. Running each of your apps in a separate VM on a standard VPS would cost a lot more.

This sounds like a case for containers, does it not?

Yes, we initially used containers. We think VMs are a more secure form of isolation, which is arguable. We also want users to have the ability to run apps based on a variety of operating systems and kernels.

Portal apps themselves can use containers of course. For example, a game server app might run each game process in a separate container within its own VM.

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