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mkj·

Back in 2017 wildcard https certificates were expensive which made self-hosting Sandstorm trickier.

Now Letsencrypt support free wildcards so perhaps it'll be easier for Sandstorm to get momentum.

Sandstorm uses a new hostname for every session https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/wildcard/#...

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At the time sandcats took some of that burden off, so you could still self-host without having to wrangle with the cert stuff yourself:

https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/sandcats/

...but yeah, now that let's encrypt does wildcards it'll be easier to do it on your own domain. I'd like to see sandstorm have some nice integration for this in the future.

(sandcats still works of course, and is still a good option to get started if you don't want to mess with DNS and certs right off the bat).

Hopefully this also makes it simpler for users to generate stable URLs for their grains, where desired.

The (free) sandcats domain/service didn’t die with the paid service/business? I had just assumed it had.. if it’s still around and still free that’s very cool.

It still exists, and there are no plans to get rid of it. Same with other community infrastructure, e.g. demo.sandstorm.io has been moved off of oasis and still runs as well. It's only oasis that's shut down.

Yes, I have no plans to shutdown sandcats. I do have plans to rewrite the server side to use Let's Encrypt and Cloudflare Workers* in order to make it easier and cheaper to operate, but even with the current implementation it's no big deal to keep running.

* I'm also the tech lead of Cloudflare Workers.

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