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Comment by timmg | Hacker News Reader

Is there a missing "product" for [easy] "self-hosting" in the cloud? (Or does it exist? Or will it only apply to a narrow kind of user?)

Like I think there should be some way to "one-button-click" install "self-hosted" apps in the cloud, tied to my personal account (and maybe with auth tied to that account). And I pay the usage fees for the cloud (hopefully on a per-request kind of basis, not an always-on server instance).

Is this a thing that I don't know about? Or is the market too narrow to be useful? (Otherwise, why doesn't it already exist?)

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> Is this a thing that I don't know about? Or is the market too narrow to be useful? (Otherwise, why doesn't it already exist?)

I'm not super familiar with it, but I think what you describe was/is the goal of Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.org/).

Then there are also efforts like YunoHost (https://yunohost.org/) which are kind of like that, gives SSO auth and everything out of the box for all the apps it supports.

Even easier to use and less involved would be maybe what TrueNAS Core has in terms of apps support, which is essentially also "one-click install" of self-hosted applications, backed by local Kubernetes installation if I remember correctly.

A more involved option for people who want to manage more themselves (both infrastructure and configuration-wise) is using NixOS, which is the approach I chose for my own local infrastructure at home. For the packages supported by NixPkgs, many applications are like ~4 lines of configuration to setup and get integrated with the rest of the apps you run.

All of these options you can run in the cloud, bare-metal or at home servers, afaik.

They are now backed by docker after the Electric Eel update.

Had to look it up, you're talking about TrueNAS moving from Kubernetes to Docker, just for clarification, https://forums.truenas.com/t/the-future-of-electric-eel-and-...

Huh, interesting as I literally moved from TrueNAS to NixOS because of two reasons 1) not liking something as complicated as Kubernetes for something as simple as home infrastructure and 2) to have a more reproducible setup.

Happy to hear 1 won't be an issue for others in the future :)

I feel that, I went back to truenas for the simplicity.

This 5 disk pool started from the freebsd truenas, to Debian, to nixos, back to linux truenas.

And the disks where bumped from 2TB to 12Tb

The problem is that self hosted apps are rarely designed to be run serverless (why would they be?) and giving each app it’a own VPS or hosted container is going to price out the self-hosted crowd, to the point where you might as well be paying for some cloud software.

In particular, self hosted apps usually are using relational databases or SQLite which need persistent disk so can’t run serverless. They also sometimes require writing to physical disk instead of object storage like S3. Writing or rewriting apps to support serverless when they have no technical need to when self hosting would make things more complicated. Most CRUD frameworks used to write self-hosted apps do not work with NoSQL out of the box.

Thing is, almost every self hosted app supports docker now and so if you like, install portainer on a VPS or NUC or raspberry pi and you’ll be able to set up most self hosted apps easily without touching the command line.

> and giving each app it’a own VPS or hosted container is going to price out the self-hosted crowd,

As far as I know, myself and other self-hosters run these sort of applications/services on home infrastructure or VPSes/dedicated/bare-metal where multiple applications usually share one instance. This could be done with docker, or cgroups, or countless other ways. I'm not sure if that's what you mean with a "hosted container" though, don't think I've heard about that before.

Yes. But that is not what OP comment is asking for. They want one-click. And request based pricing. I was explaining why request based pricing is infeasible and one-click install would price people out (because it would imply a VPS per service).

And I said the same thing at the end of my comment about the way people would host things using docker on a VPS or home server.

> Thing is, almost every self hosted app supports docker now and so if you like, install portainer on a VPS or NUC or raspberry pi and you’ll be able to set up most self hosted apps easily without touching the command line.

Why would you use a new VPS for each application? Just dockerize and put all your apps on one VPS, which is what most self-hosters do.

Because that’s not one-click setup or priced per request, which was the comment I was responding to was seeking.

And I did say at the end of my comment:

I think the most popular service like this is PikaPods.

I hadn't heard of it before. Thanks!

Yes! There are lots!

Even decades ago, you could buy a web hosting account and simply click an icon to install Wordpress, CRMs, webmail clients, etc in your account and get started with minimal hassle. There are very likely many of these still around. Of course, if you are not a technical user, you are limited to what they provide.

In the realm of containers, there are also many many choices for this. Most are open source, some are commercial. The problem with all that I know of, is that when you want to use an app that isn't in their "store", or when you want to use it differently than how they have packaged it, either you can't do it because it's not supported, or you essentially have to learn docker from scratch anyway.

Shared hosting providers have had such installers, typically as part of cPanel, for decades. An example would be Fantastico https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastico_(web_hosting)

You’re not going to get per-request billing, but shared hosting is typically as cheap as you’re going to get for “always-on” web hosting.

Several apps that try to solve this. Good one, but costly, is cloudron. It allows you to one click install a wide range of self-hosted apps. Cloudron itself is subscription software that can be installed on own server or many cloud options.

There are many more, though. Things like proxmox with app stores, which are easily installed in most clouds.

Also CasaOs and others.

Not sure if there is something like that tracker but I think you would like something like Linode marketplace:

https://www.linode.com/marketplace/apps/

I was thinking of building a self-hosted app framework that manages the application lifecycle like how smartphones do.

The only problem is that the existing apps wouldn't work with it.

Cloudron solves this going from the other side: they package apps themselves. To support transparent migrations and backups.

I used to hear that Yunohost was a good option, but I am not certain if this is still used by selfhosters today.

Look for self-hosted PaaS, platform as a service. Coolify and Dokploy are good options, on Hetzner.

Ryot is an 'everything' tracker and has a good section for workouts. Very easy to deploy.

Aren't most people interested in self hosting specifically to get away from the cloud?

I don't know if you can reasonably generalize self hosting.

To a lot of people, self hosting is about getting complete (or effectively complete) control of your data and privacy. That can be compatible with the cloud.

Yes - and/or data sovereignty.

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