Self hosting - https://cloudron.io
Anyway ServerPilot then scrapped their free plan so I've been looking for an alternative. cloudron looks cool, I don't see anything specific to Node.js/Express, but it does have a LAMP stack which includes Apache, so I might try that. Otherwise I'll probably use something like CapRover [2], a self-hosted platform as a service.
Are there features ServerPilot is missing that would justify the price more for you? Some examples might be monitoring, analytics, automated security patching, containerization of workloads, etc.
Would the plan be more appealing if the cost of the plan, the portal, and the VM hosting itself were all rolled into one? (i.e. you would just pay one company, rather than having to sign up for DO as well as ServerPilot).
2) Should be free when used in non-commercial applications. Multiple servers included.
3) Keep the common and already available typical configurations free: lamp, lemp, python, letsencrypt, email. Charge for things which no other panel free or otherwise typically supports. lightspeed, go, caddy, load balancing, sql replication, graphql, etc. Thats value.
neat, don't think I've seen something like this before!
in addition, sometimes people don't know things that you know, and you would do well to keep that in mind: https://xkcd.com/1053/
wget https://cloudron.io/cloudron-setup
chmod +x ./cloudron-setup
./cloudron-setup --provider [digitalocean,ec2,generic,ovh,...]Hell, I am a dev, and I still did not know that will let me create one quickly.
- user picks a cloud (or have a "Advanced" option on the next step instead)
- you show them OpenID/OAuth form for their cloud provider
- guide them through the creation of an account if necessary
- you get the token, that permits your server to create cloud resources on behalf of the user
- you go ahead and create their services for them
- potentially store the token to be able to update the apps automatically
I thought about that, when I was considering to make a similar service (also similar to sandstorm.io). Glad to see somebody doing something in that area (I guess without the permissions model yet).
Problem is: most clouds don't let you easily create an account, so "guide them through the creation of an account" might be impossible without leaving the browser.
I have been a Cloudron user for a bit of time. Recently I have launched a company and we're now a paying and very happy customer of Cloudron's business subscription.
It seems that the "next app suggestion" process have stalled. To me as an outsider of your internal process, I cannot see what applications are being preferred over others. There are tons of very good suggestions which are not receiving traction it seems, from the app suggestion-forum.
A few examples which Cloudron needs, and would benefit from having attracting more users:
- A Wireguard VPN frontend application
- Jupyter Notebooks Environment
- Odoo ERP Community edition
- Erpnext
I'm pretty sure that's their whole point of existence.