Show HN: Disco – The self-hosting platform I wish existed years ago
After getting tired of high per-project pricing on platforms like Heroku and Render, and frustrated with Kubernetes' complexity, we created a platform with all the polish and convenience of commercial solutions, but as an Open Source project you can run anywhere. Disco gives you a streamlined experience (ie a clean CLI and web UI) with the freedom and economics of self-hosting.
Key features:
- Deploy from GitHub with fast deployment times - from git push to being live, our main static site deploys in 2 seconds (really); a medium sized Django app deploys in ~25 seconds
- Host multiple projects on a single server, cutting costs by 50%+ compared to per-project pricing
- Works with Node, Rust, Python, Django, Rails, static sites, and more
- Includes "good enough" Postgres for projects that don't need enterprise features
- API keys for team access instead of SSH key management
- Run on your own infrastructure - from cloud VMs to Raspberry Pis to on-prem
- Built-in horizontal scaling - add servers to distribute the load and increase capacity
- Optionally, let us manage the infra for you: same Open Source stack, but less to worry about
A real-world example: We moved idealist.org 's staging environments, a highly trafficked site, from Heroku to Disco on a single $50/month server, which now hosts 6 staging environments. On Heroku, each would have cost $500/month ($3k total). We also moved all of Idealist's production frontend SSR rendering to Disco, getting better stability at 1/5th of the cost.
I personally moved a number of my hobby sites to a Raspberry Pi that sits at home, saving me hundreds for apps that used to be at Heroku and Render. See my (unhinged) Localhost talk at the Recurse Center about this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2lP7C8VT6M
Speaking of Recurse, we host a "community" Disco installation there i.e. a shared 8Gb Raspberry Pi that's hosting 52 (static/backend/go/python/rust, etc.) web projects at the time of this writing. That's also a fun use case!
TLDR: Disco is perfect for both DIY self-hosters and teams looking for a more cost-effective deployment platform. Available now for self-hosting (free and Open Source) or as a managed service.
Try it out https://disco.cloud/ and let us know what you think here or on our Discord. Cheers!