Show HN: Static website hosting with auto optimization | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Static website hosting with auto optimization

clodui.com

63 pointscvrajeesh55 comments

Your app seems geared toward users who are not very technical. I think your pricing structure is too sophisticated. I would include everything in the free plan and the tiers would only be bandwidth usage and form submissions. No one is going to upgrade for robots.txt file support. Even the 30 deploys a month is a lot but it’s psychologically going to feel limiting and decrease signups. They’re gonna upgrade because they need to capture more forms not because of deploy count, that’s just going to upset people. That’s why Netlify has unlimited everything but if you want to capture forms or any other server side processing, you pay. That’s the biggest value add for these services imo.

Thank you, that's a great suggestion. I need to go back to the drawing board and improve pricing based on all the valuable inputs collected from here

I agree in general but FYI Netlify's free tier now limits build minutes. It may end up being the lever that gets me to upgrade.

That’s interesting, thanks for the update. I think removing build restrictions still applies though. In netlify’s case they are trying to convert their large free base whereas this product is new and needs those free signups for future growth/conversion and I bet the build minutes aren’t going to be a huge cost. I would just throttle heavy users (deprioritize in the queue once you exceed 100 builds in a month or something). I wouldn’t even bother doing this work until/unless it’s a scaling or cost issue though, it may never be and saying the builds are “unlimited*” with some wording that excessive use may be throttled would be enough cya.

Netlify does only has 500 build minutes a month. If you go over, you get charged. Although if your build takes 2 minutes, you can still deploy 250 times per month which is around 8 times a day.. so still very generous.

edit: I see somebody beat me to it :)

Like the idea! But for me I do not see the a benefit over a simple FTP enabled webserver + cloudflare apart from the form submissions. Would you elaborate on that, what makes it worth 5$/month?

* Pricing hint:

- Go either more expensive with the monthly plan, or cheaper with the yearly. For only 5% off I would not go for the yearly commitment.

- Display your yearly price also as 4.74$ & 14.24$ per month instead of the big yearly sum as the big number requires me as customer to pull out my calculator to see the actual saving

- Add Call to actions to the pricing boxes e.g. "Signup now for Business plan", even it just redirects to the signup page, it has less friction for me as customer

* Other website feedback:

- I don't find a imprint. If you control my website, I would like to know who you are.

- I assume you are not a native english speaker (me neither), as some sentences sound a bit weird on the site. Maybe get a proofreader. (I do that for my projects and it increases the sites a lot :D)

- Especially for the target group you mentioned I think the automatic rollback is a good selling argument. As if you only use e.g. FTP and overwrite files, everyone knows that feeling of accidentally overwritten a wrong file or with an old version.

- For being GDPR compliant your privacy policy is not enough

- Unlimited Bandwidth could be a bad idea as some high traffic sites could cost you a lot

- A SLA would be nice to have, like "99.9% uptime" to know you are trustworthy and my site will not be down for month

* Feature ideas:

- Automatically add lazy loading for images

Founder here: the advantages over FTP based approach are - no need to install extract tools and deployments are atomic, so you can rollback instantaneously.

Settings up Cloudflare or AWS CloudFront + S3 is easy for users who all familiar with technologies. What I have seen is, there are many web designers out there who design awesome websites but lacks technical knowledge. My brother was like that, he designs websites but I was the one who was helping him to host and write PHP scripts for handling form submissions etc... that's one reason I built a service like this.

Thank you for the suggestion on pricing, I'll consider it and update it accordingly.

Update:

Image lazy loading enabled when website optimization settings is set to "Full"

> Thank you for the suggestion on pricing, I'll consider it and update it accordingly.

You should calculate everything and move your prices up as you have unlimited bandwidth. I have few static websites, but smallest one generates on avg. 400gb monthly transfer(plain website with main content), adding to this image optimisation(sizes, etc) and few other options totalling nearly 1TB+ a month.

So for me $15 looks nice, but you would loose a huge amount of money on clients like me. You can't expect that static website will weight 1MB and eat 1GB of bandwidth a month. :)

This is why Cloudflare has image optimisation in Business plan, or Imgix which is pricey. :)

Thank you, that's a good point. I'll change unlimited bandwidth in the business plan to limited.

I like what you're doing but I have to admit that I am finding a lot of the front page copy to be somewhat awkward:

"Clodui automatically minifies all your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, then served in compressed gzip format to further reduce the file size. All the requests served over HTTP/2, which further boosts your website speed."

would be much easier to read if it were reworded like so:

"Clodui automatically minifies all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. These minified files are then compressed and served over HTTP/2, which further boosts your websites speed."

If you want help cleaning up more of it, contact me at my username @ gmail.

IMO all copy should be thrown away as it's aimed for non-technical users. So cut this technical buzzwords and write like for kids. ;)

Agreed. Something like: “using our Accelerator technology, we take care of optimizing your website with industry-best practices. Your users get fast page speeds, and you can stop worrying and get back to building sites.” Then have a graph of page load times without acceleration and with acceleration and a link for more info for the curious.

agreed, contents need to be improved. I'm a solo founder working on a shoestring budget. Planning to raise funds and invest more time on improving contents

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Thank you for the suggestion, I'll check those options

A buzzword bingo like that would instantly turn me off, but perhaps that doesn't matter. I admit I'm not in the target market.

To be fair, it wasn't that buzzwordy, it's just the "Accelerator technology" thing that biased me. The rest of the sentence was fine, maybe that's what happened for you too.

https://imgz.org/?v=c

Worth noting that firebase (Google) provides a similar service. It's entirely free to host static websites. Definitely ends up on a cdn and definitely uses static compression. Ssl certs even get auto handled.

True, but I really like the simple click to deploy feature. I can see it will add value to designers who find simple deployments hard.

Hi Cvrajeesh, congrats on launching! It's a big achievement to get your project out the door and in customer's hands.

We launched a very similar service (fast.io) a few months ago and have found some good interest in the product. Unfortunately, however, there are many other good solutions for simple deployments and performant static hosting. My question for you would be, what are you doing that solves your customer's problem so much better than competitors that they'd be willing to put their mission-critical website on your (unproven) service over anyone else's?

For these simple use-cases (the ones you appear to be targeting) most users just aren't willing to pay. The more sophisticated users who are running businesses (and would pay) often need more features and greater control over their hosting solution - features that will take you a long time to build out and prove in the market.

As such, we're working on a product pivot that's educated by the insights we've gained through our initial launch. We don't want to go head-on with other products that are, quite frankly, doing a great job in this market already. I'll be really curious to see/hear if you encounter similar challenges and how you navigate them.

> We launched a very similar service

I haven't seen them post to a Show HN to shamelessly promote and link to their own rival version, so that's one difference.

I can see how you might think that, but to be more clear we are moving out of this market - I'm trying to be helpful to the OP (and anyone else who's looking at this market) by sharing our experience.

A Google search is going to yield a lot of great other companies for static hosting like https://netlify.com (which even supports this exact functionality of drag and drop uploads) and https://zeit.co just to name a couple, not to mention a graveyard of other services who've tried to do similar things over the last 5 years. You might even notice that we've changed our messaging to focus on file-sharing and direct links - not website hosting.

A few nitpicks:

- In the ToS there's no mention of the company I'm making the agreement with

- I'd appreciate an about page about who's behind this, but my first point kinda explains it :)

- What CDN are you using? Have you built your own?

Thank you, we're using AWS Cloudfront as the CDN.

ToS needs to be re-written; currently, I used an online service to generate it :(

Just a small thing: Cloudfront gets very expensive rather quickly. We went to a $4,000 pm to a $20 pm bill by moving our CDN for static assets from Cloudfront to Cloudflare. The only reason we let it come that far is that we had AWS credits. But as soon as we neared the end of the credits, we made the switch to Cloudflare.

Thank you for the heads-up

Just curious: how is "clodui" pronounced?

At first I read Cloud UI, but after pausing a little I realized it was not Cloud UI.

I mention this because I think names matter for word-of-mouth recommendation. In many interviews, Morgan Freeman would recount that The Shawshank Redemption bombed at the box-office because back in the day word-of-mouth was still dominant way of getting movie recommendations, and people couldn't say or remember the word "Shawshank".

Founder here: I'm pronouncing it as "clod ui". The name came from the word "Cloud" + "UI" and removed "u" from Cloud so the domain is available.

I'm not sure if this was intentional but "clod" in UK English has a funny non-flattering meaning (google "define:clod").

"Clod" as in "stupid person"? Was that intentional?

Woof, expensive. This might be worth it if there's live support included and a really easy control panel, but otherwise a similar setup is $60/year.

The image resizing and optimization is a good sell, but it's dramatically more expensive to have it when under the hood it's a relatively cheap feature aside from initial build out, and it's available in basic form for free on places like Netlify.

Wanted to read about forms in your docs. Page does not exist : https://www.clodui.com/form/add-form

this is the correct URL https://www.clodui.com/docs/form/add-form

Looks interesting, the minification looks like a pretty good selling point.

One thing I noticed is the slow connection from Australia, it seems your CDN is limited to Europe and America.

Thank you, I'll check that

Would be nice to know more about the CDN, because after all just two POPs makes a very simple CDN, but a CDN isn't just two POPs!

Founder here: my entire stack is on AWS. I'm using CloudFront as the CDN

aren't a lot of these things already handled by web servers and browsers? (caching. gzip compression, etc...)

Founder here,

yes caching and gzip is done by web servers. Clodui does much more than that

* minification of CSS, JS and HTML

* automatic webp image generation, dynamic image resize

* and the website is served via CDN, which connects to the nearest CDN server

* automatic form handling etc...

We're really targeting users with less technical knowledge in server-side but creates awesome websites.

Does it really make sense to "minify" everything when you have gzip enabled?

minify saves a few bytes per file but image optimization feature reduces your website size considerably. Usually, people rely on image CDNs to do this, we provide it with hosting service itself.

webp isn't supported at all by Safari, on any platform. Is there any kind of intelligent fallback in case you have Apple users?

we fall back to the original image when webp is not supported by the browser

Fallback server-side based on Accepts? Or JS based fallback, or fallback based on user agent, or...?

Sorry. There are a lot of ways of doing this, with a lot of services that choose... Interesting... ways of doing it.

yes, the fallback is done on the server-side based on the accept header

Wow !! This is a great piece of work. Hassle-free hosting and automatic optimization

that's just cloudflare. they are doing all of those.

I guess they don't handle form submissions automatically, need to write code to handle it.

they have cloudflare workers for that.

I'm not targeting users with that level of technical experience or those who want to spend the time and effort to do all those.

make sense. but i feel the difference are not big enough. cloudflare dns change do most of this, with the exception of form submission.

Really cool idea ! :)

Looks like Netlify

Founder here: I do like Netlify, IMHO it's targeting developer community, I'm targeting users who all are still developing websites in the traditional way.

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