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Comment by elliottkember | Hacker News Reader

Hey there! I'm Forge's lead developer. We're targeting people who want to set up a site, but don't want to set up a server or use Amazon's admin panels.

For example, many front-end developers and designers struggle with things like S3 buckets, setting up cloudfront, minifying assets and images, and keeping a version history.

If you're a developer like me or you, Forge is useful because it's one less tool that you have to mess with to host your site. Simple, easy, everything in one place. I hate using the S3 admin panel and wanted to build something I'd enjoy using.

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Thanks for your reply!

I definitely agree that all things AWS are terrible in terms of learning curve and usability. It's easy to forget how unintuitive setting up static hosting on S3 is (bucket policies, ugh).

So I guess your real competition is either (a) GitHub as that becomes more accessible to non-developers or (b) traditional FTP-accessible web servers. There's definitely room for improvement in both.

Best of luck to you with your launch.

(One of your competitors has a really neat feature that magically makes static web forms work -- https://www.bitballoon.com/. This seems like a great feature that really sets a hosting service apart from a FTP-accessible web server. Making a contact form is non-trivial, much more so than using FTP IMO.)

> It's easy to forget how unintuitive setting up static hosting on S3 is (bucket policies, ugh).

Yeah, exactly. There are a lot of services available for this, but precious few really nice ones.

> So I guess your real competition is either (a) GitHub as that becomes more accessible to non-developers or (b) traditional FTP-accessible web servers. There's definitely room for improvement in both.

It'd take a pretty awesome GitHub mac app to really sell me on GitHub's appeal to the general public. Even I find that, since I'm working with an app like Hammer for static sites, it breaks my workflow to have to go into the Terminal and type Git commands.

> (One of your competitors has a really neat feature that magically makes static web forms work -- https://www.bitballoon.com/. This seems like a great feature that really sets a hosting service apart from a FTP-accessible web server. Making a contact form is non-trivial, much more so than using FTP IMO.)

Yes, I've just checked it out. Definitely a useful feature and something we've often considered. Good to have some competition, I guess.

> It'd take a pretty awesome GitHub mac app to really sell me on GitHub's appeal to the general public. Even I find that, since I'm working with an app like Hammer for static sites, it breaks my workflow to have to go into the Terminal and type Git commands.

I think GitHub is moving in that direction. We're not talking about the general public here -- we're talking about people who can write HTML. There's not a big stretch from that to working on a static site via the GitHub website (you can create/edit/delete files online now).

For a single-person project, the GitHub for Mac app is probably easy enough for at least some non-devs to figure out. I've got some of my non-dev friends to use it for sharing statistical analysis code. It's not perfect but it's doable.

With that said, I definitely see where you're coming from now.

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