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Ruby, PHP, MySQL, Perl, Free Hosting for geeks

1.ai

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The initial question that comes to mind is: how will this be sustainable? It's all well and good to offer this service, but will it be a drain on your finances 6 months down the road? Will it become a drain if more than 250 people sign up for it? I understand that one can get a server with 128GB of SSD storage, quad core, and 16GB of RAM for around $100/mo if one looks enough, but that would only serve 256 people at your quotas. Would you be able to offer the service if you had to spend $1,000/mo?

As a follow-up: why should I use Dotgeek over Heroku or AppFog? Both of those are commercial offerings with a free tier, but their commercial pricing makes me a lot more confident that it will stick around. What are you offering that trumps their offering?

Kudos for trying things (and I'm not trying to sound harsh at all). Still, this feels like it would have been more interesting in 2006 than today where we have many options at free tiers and even more paid services to choose from. I guess I'm just wondering why I would want to sign up for this rather than something else. If this is more about learning systems administration, then it's an awesome project and I'm sure you'll learn a lot and gain great experience. It's awesome to try things even if they aren't meant to be commercial alternative services just to get the experience of doing them.

Hello Mdasen ! thanks for your comment and the very good questions. To start with a quick answer: "Would you be able to offer the service if you had to spend $1,000/mo?" Yes :) At the moment we have 3 servers and we are far from full capacity. Of course nothing can scale to the infinite but, from what I could observe, there are always people coming and going. We do have bigger hard disks than 128 gb so the quota in a single server is higher than 250 or it should be.

Why should you use 1.ai dotgeek over heroku or appfog ? If you do have a commercial application you should run in a paid service because, in the end, hosting your commercial or critical app will depend on support. This said our space is for developers/geeks/learners that want to try something not necessarily commercial.

Another reason I would see vs. Heroku free (I think is only fair to compare with the free option) is that here you do have a simple SFTP access and you run things like in the "old days"- your way. We also give MySQL which is not part of Heroku free. I also feel that the performance of an app in our server would be better vs. others free tiers.

I think that both Heroko and AppFog are great concepts as they take away the servers duty from your hands.

We do not compete with any paid service hence it is only entirely free and somehow "as is". I agree that this might be useless to many yet I would think that for a young developer - student or really anyone that wants to try something without any financial commitment it is a pretty good offer.

Thanks for the kudos (I don't think you have been harsh at all) I think dropping your app via SFTP (being Ruby, PHP or even a perl app with Dancer) is a very straightforward process and could be useful. Judging from the great numbers of signups after this post I think that at least some are curious which is always great ! Thanks again David

FWIW you can get the ClearDB or Xeround addon (MySQL) for free on Heroku.

oh sorry if I missed that. Actually I just checked again and It looks like for free you can get only a web dyno with no worker ?(I always get confused by this) DB is limited to 10K rows we have 512MB but in any case we are not competing with Heroku at all - more power to heroku which is certainly a great service :)

Minor copywriting note: The autoresponder email says "your hosting space request is now under approval.", instead of "under review".

will fix it - thanks for the feedback. Just approved your application :)

fixed now thanks again for spotting this

Sustainability of the service is a concern, so I wouldn't use it for anything mission-critical. Still, I applied mainly so I could have a place to host and stage a few different open source PHP and Rails projects I'm working on.

The application process should allow them to rate-limit new signups. And shut down new accounts if their infrastructure starts hitting limits. Also - Hopefully they're not afraid to slam down the ban hammer on abusive accounts.

I approved your account so you should be ready to go. Good observation about the "mission-critical" part. As you can see after the login this is clearly specified pretty much everywhere. We are indeed keeping a close eye on abuse and, as specified in the EULA, we have zero tolerance on this as it is essential to keep it functional and fast. Thanks again for giving it a try :)

FYI, so I thought "Ok, I might try it for something simple" and signed up. Got an error that I hadn't accepted the terms/conditions, which incidentally, are very easy to miss. So I checked the button again, after re-entering my password. Then, I mind-farted and wrote "June" for the 5th month of the year, so the submission failed again. After re-entering my password a second time, and re-checking the terms and conditions box, and re-entering the captcha answer, on the third request, got an error that my "About You" wasn't long enough.*

Then, I gave up.

Full text was: "Learning ruby & javascript. Will host some simple one page apps with Sinatra. Current project: simple anagram finder." What else do you need here?

msluyter: sorry to hear about the signup troubles but the motivation length is min 140 chars. We don't think that this is too long (one tweet?). Adding a more line or few more words should do the trick (e.g. write something about yourself or if you prefer a poem!). At least we don't use re-captcha - each time I sign up for a site using that I need at least 4 or 5 attempts ! Thanks to this HN submission we are received a lot of applications so you can make it too! (if you want of course).

I'm maybe cynical here, but this service will go away within a year. And it won't be because of too high direct costs for the host. It will be because of too much hassle.

When you do something like this these days, you only attract trouble (and a very few well-meaning people): spammers, script-kiddies, pirates looking for cheap storage or seedboxes and hacker groups valuing the anonymity for their releases which in turn will attract DoS attacks which will be a huge hassle for the provider to deal with.

So within a year, you won't only have to deal with too many users taking too many resources, you will also have to deal with annoyed providers, with law enforcement constantly asking for data you can't provide and of course with constant DMCA takedown requests.

And that's why we can't have nice things any more :/

Well it looks like they have an approval process so I feel that they can easily ban users that abuse their service. With that said, I'm sure that's an issue they will have to eventually face, but that is the liability that all hosting companies have.

granted is not easy but "you only attract trouble (and a very few well-meaning people): spammers, script-kiddies, pirates" to give a bit of credit to the HN community most of the applicants were, in my opinion, well-meaning people ranging from students in College to developers looking for another playground. Most of the things loved by spammers (e.g. emails via localhost, remote connections) are not allowed so I don't think it would be so interesting to trouble makers. For storage there are so many free solutions that I doubt that anyone would even bother with this but...you have a good point and we are doing our best to keep the trouble makers away and monitor the system with a fast kickban action when needed ;)

Why there's no python?

mostly for our limited knowledge of python but we could certainly add it in the future if there is some interest ! While there is no official support we want to be able to fix things if they do not work. This said I had a look last night and we could probably add it soon as it seems simple enough

Please, do! The python community in web development is definitely a big one and we don't want to miss on the fun :).

would mod_wsgi + django be enough or is something else needed ?

That would be good enough to run web app/s so +1 for pyhon/django support!

Django is a definite must have. People are finally starting to see the value in it and its powering some of the most heavily trafficked sites on the internet today (e.g. Pinterest, Instagram, etc.). Plus, the GIS tools in Django/PostgreSQL are unrivaled in open source offerings and beat some commercial ones even.

Considering Python is possibly the most popular web dev language at the moment, yes, I would suggest you consider it.

+1 for python support

we are adding python support in this very moment. Tests are fine with flask trying django now :) should be live tomorrow.

Your signup process is really frustrating. First, your About you should give me an indication of how many characters have been completed and how many are left. Second, your Captcha is asking for the X month of the year. Most people I know dont say September (when typing at least), instead just say Sep. There is no visual clue or early warning before you bounce me 4 times. Frustrating.

sorry to hear that but the the x month of the year would still be September and I don't know anyone that would say "see you in sep". The "about you" is 140 characters - like a tweet which is essentially just a couple of lines. There is a link go the explanation below that field. Writing "I want it" or "I need it " is not sufficient. Please understand this is required to be sure that the service doesn't die on the weight of spammers or people planning to use this for other trouble making activities. Over 300 people made it since this news was published so...yes you can (if you want).

I sent request for approval and its pending for 9 days..don't think its for everyone.Anyways python support will create more interest.

sorry to hear that - perhaps the motivation/about you was too short? We have some pending applicants because of the short or vague information provided ..at any rate just drop me a line at dotgeek at 1 dot ai and I will activate it asap.

Thanks for the quick response and you are right I did not provide project specific details because I do not have at this moment.But yeah I was hoping to get some place so that if I start something I could use that.

I think I have found your application - approved now && live at http://monami.1.ai :)

When are you going to support some enterprise-grade technologies like Python and PostgreSQL? Sure, those tools you have now are great for hobbyists and part-time hackers (with maybe the exception of Ruby), but a real dev sandbox should have some better tools to work with. Take Google for instance, they chose Java and Python.

well mysql is used by google and twitter too so I don't really see them as hobbyists only (+ we use it daily for business and not just for an hobby). Python support is in the cards and we are just looking at it right now. BUT again this is not an enterprise-grade service and really not comparable to google. But thanks for your input - this clearly isn't for everyone but can be useful to many.

Oh man, I remember using dotgeek a long time ago for some minor PHP stuff. Awesome to see it expand (and still exist).

yeah it was in 2003! first to launch PHP 5 hosting with the nightly build! these were the days with no cloud and now everything has changed ... so yes we are back with a better service and more servers ! thanks for looking at this (I think I even remember your name from our old users !)

Any plans to support JVM based languages? I imagine something like Tomcat would work with your ideology of uploading a file (in this case a .jar) via FTP and being up and running. Adding JVM support would add many languages to your supported list quickly :)

thanks for posting this - I am behind 1.ai so if you have any question ask away :)

Hmmm.. bad timing, it seems 1.ai is down (at least for me).

And it's back...

How did you get the domain?

I have all the numbers 0 to 9.ai I was early in the day when they opened registrations :)

0.ai is a clone of 1.ai at the moment

Why is there no paid subscription option? Do you have any plans of such?

I'd like to upgrade to a paid, supported service if my website gets any traction.

Hi dexen, the reason is that there are already many excellent (or so we hear) options for paid hosting /apps deployment and we think that there isn't a need for yet another another good service (unless you can really make a difference. We had some ideas in this direction like with having all the apps cloned in 3 live servers in different locations including the mysql database but this was just an idea) but we do give some support through the forums and occasionally via email :)

and actually mdasen did summarize many of the good paid alternatives which are backed by solid money and infrastructure.... but to be fairly honest the another big reason is that we are all busy with our full time careers and do not need the money / start a new commercial activity well the "fun" becomes work !

.. Yeah, seriously what's the catch?

I was just wondering why everyone expects a catch ! :) may be you can help me on this!

Hi David!

hey nice to see you :) 10 years or went so quickly ?

Step 1. Attract geeks / nerds / hackers.

Step 2. Get sourcecode

Step 3. Win!

hello dlsym, well we have no secret plan for World domination through code if is what you meant :) on a serious note for very sensitive code (e.g. private) I would recommend a dedicated server or an instance. It goes without saying that we do not touch hosted code (beside a general, automated file check that ensure that there isn't anything malicious going on).

This looks really cool, it seems perfect for hosting games in the playtesting phase, as a free host without onerous bandwidth restrictions. +1 for Python support.

I don't really need this (right now), but I'd like to commend you on using a sensible Captcha and not some ridiculous fuzzy image.

thank you :) it is a very easy one but sufficient for now and yeah we hate with a passion the fuzzy image chaptcha!

I wonder if a captcha is really even necessary here considering that all users are reviewed?

good point - probably not but judging from the number of people that applied anyway and yet pasted a lot of random text in the "about you box" (or copy and paste galore of lore ipsum) probably make it a little harder to them to submit bogus applications makes sense :)

It looks awesome, kudos! Just a quick question, are there any plans to support node.js / Express? :)

Is it possible to point my own domain(s) at an instance, instead of having to use a 1.ai subdomain?

at this point we don't configure domains for the users other than the subdomain but you could forward it using a free service - but if you really need it drop us a line after you try it out and are happy about it.

It's disturbing that you're not making any money out of it, but I'm all for it.

Kudos for you.

thank you for the kind words ! Oh well if it was a paid hosting it would be yet another hosting service and would have probably not even made it to hackernews. There is a lot of "money can't buy" fun and pleasure to see what smart developers build + helping people starting out and learning something new. Isn't it ironic that so many things are free online (e.g. having a blog, storing files etc.) yet hosting is not ?

Do you provide access to a full shell/ssh? If so, is 'screen' or 'tmux' available?

no we do not - it is SFTP only at this stage. The idea is pretty much "drop and run" your apps being Ruby, PHP or Perl.

Just signed up. Looking forward to giving it a try.

Thank you - it has been approved && is now live at http://saltcod.1.ai - you should have received the full info via email

What's the catch?

There is really no catch other that there is no professional support (see.. for a slightly longer explanation http://1.ai/specs) and that we take no responsibility for your data (e.g. you should always keep a backup. this doesn't mean that we do not care about the service just we do not want to be liable if something goes wrong).

What's paying to keep the service running?

It is paid by myself and I do not need to make any money out of this - similar to the official mirror I am running for the PHP project. The service doesn't need ads/paid subscriptions but again it is not to be compared with a paid service as we do not provide professional support.

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