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Show HN: DigitalOcean + vercel on Your own baremetal servers

demo.hoy.sh

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Hoy offers a cloud-like management experience for baremetal servers, aimed at delivering the same ease and flexibility you'd find with services like Digital Ocean and Vercel but for your own hardware.

Baremetal servers can be significantly more cost-effective and performant compared to traditional cloud services, and they often come with generous bandwidth quotas.

The tool supports servers from any provider, including Equinix and Hetzner.

Here's what you can do once your servers are connected:

- Deploy Node.js and Python applications

- Set up static websites

- Manage databases such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis

- Install open source stacks like Wordpress, Elasticsearch, and RabbitMQ

For developers, it has automatic git deployments creating a Vercel/Netlify-like environment on your own hardware.

With hoy cli, deploying an app will be as easy as "hoy deploy"

Using bare metal servers means very low predictable & fixed costs, better performance and eliminates surprise billings.

Hoy is aimed towards large cloud like setups offering distributed compute storage and networking on your own hardware instead of being a VPS management system (Like caprover etc).

You can try it out now with our demo, no signup required: https://demo.hoy.sh/

Happy to answer any questions.

I didn't see any mention of JVM apps, I would expect this to be a reasonably large opportunity. With Spring, Quarkus, Ktor, http4k and many more, there are lots of people choosing to build backends on the JVM but deployment is problematic. Vendors like fly.io don't run JVM apps unless Dockerized. They don't work great with AWS Lambda or serverless unless built with Graal. I think lots of developers would like to simply drop a JAR file on a server somewhere and have it run, but I'm not aware of any cloud services which enable this.

I am personally working through deploying on bare metal cloud servers using Ansible and yes, it is challenging to build a full-fledged server with a reverse proxy, local data store, OpenTelelmetry collector, and my JVM app backend -- then secure the server, share keys, run all the services, export logs, open an entry points for a CI deployment, manage env variables, etc. Dokku is an option but has its limits.

The benefit, of course, is that I can rent bare VPS's with redundancy for a year for less $ than most managed services charge per month. If your service made JVM deployments easy while keeping costs low, you might have this market all to yourself.

Dokku Maintainer here.

Curious what limits you run up against with Dokku, and how we might better handle those in the project (whether those are JVM related or otherwise).

Interesting gap in the market.

You need someone who is price conscious enough to forgo the cloud. Either because they are spending millions and want to be spending 100,000 or they are some small solo dev who is being tight. Taking the former example, if they are spending millions, they probably would be looking at Kubernetes for this. Even if more complicated, it is more industry standard. For example getting SOC2 compliance there are guides and so on, and there are training courses, and you can pull in a consultant. I am interesting on who the target is for this.

This demo page is just a tailwind template with a few modifications here and there.

Looks good, just a quick UI note: I can’t click “add node” as the bottom menu with “nodes” “apps” etc was blocking it.

I tried to visit https://marketing-site.hoy.live/ but the website is down!

Would this be comparable with CapRover, Coolify, Dokku - any I missed?

These are mostly VPS or single server management tools.

Hoy is targeting mid sized compaines looking to build a modern, highly available private cloud platform with distributed compute storage and networking.

- Load balancing across multiple servers

- Auto scaling instances as well as Nodes on demand.

- Fully managed Database & Replicas.

- S3 comptable storage

- Built in observability

- First class dev experience.

So something in the realm of Proxmox or PVC or xcp-ng?

I would agree that the three things I can list here are a hard sell compared to any integrated cloud provider - they all focus on VMs and the rest is up to you, or so my experience has gone so far. Looking forward to trying this out!

Dokku maintainer here.

Admittedly I only looked through this briefly but:

- I don't see too much in the way of documentation, so I can't compare that to Dokku's - Not super clear how cluster management works - Kubernetes based on some of the api responses - but it appears to take a cluster-first approach here. Dokku has cluster support via it's k3s scheduler but thats something you need to configure (not hard, just not default). - Neither the OSS nor Dokku Pro offering stand up actual servers (thats up to you to do), while this appears to interact with actual cloud providers? - It's not clear if this is an open source project - seems like a completely managed offering - but doesn't seem to be. If it isn't OSS, then you can't install it on your server, which may or may not be important to you. - Dokku doesn't provide anything out of the box for cloud storage. You can configure a minio app, but thats about the long and short of it. - Dokku is plugin-based, so we offer plugins for the major datastores and other functionality, while this seems to be more of a catered experience. - Dokku only has an official UI via Dokku Pro (there are community offerings as well but I can't speak to those) while Hoy has that built in (presumably because it's a paid service). - It's not clear how hoy does app building (or if it depends on your CI to do that). Dokku provides a few different ways to build/deploy applications (Heroku Buildpacks, CNB, Nixpacks, AWS Lambda functions, Dockerfile, images).

Seems neat - I like the live demo, and others definitely will too! - but not sure if comparing this to OSS offerings makes sense to be honest. It's probably closer to any of the other paid, managed solutions that allow you to provision clusters to various clouds (on the cloud managed version or otherwise).

looks like a nice idea, if I understand it correct. Do you have any ideas how much you would charge or for which features you would charge or have a free tier?

Thank you.

A free tier for hobbyists and then small monthly subscription based on number of servers managed.

Addons which are not directly handled by your compute will be charged as well. for example DNS, CDN, Backups etc.

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