Show HN: Deploy your websites from Dropbox
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Always interesting to see more and more startups popping up in the static hosting space. Since we launched a year ago there's been at least 6 other entering the space.
Right now it looks like your main selling point is price.
Think carefully about whether that's the way you want to go. The real competitors here is the humongous shared hosting market, and the big players there have much deeper pockets and far better economies of scale than any startup.
With a $1/site price you'll pretty much never have a chance to make paid advertising a viable customer acquisition channel and as someone else mentioned, think about what the price of giving any kind of support will be. The lower end of the market will (in my experience) also be the place where people will need the most help with stuff like DNS setup, or basic issues such as not having an index.html file, etc, etc.
Good luck!
Hiding complexity from the user is mostly good; it's a shame that the replication service isn't more capable.
What negative experiences have you had with Dropbox + VCS?
I have 2+ side projects or submodules under development at any given time. I've been storing them in Dropbox for the last 3 years. I've been working on them actively from 3 different machines (two Ubuntu desktops and one OS X laptop), and they're turned off -- so not syncing -- when I'm not using them.
All that said, I haven't had one single problem. So empirically speaking, I don't see any problem with the mechanics of .git folders in Dropbox.
(Note that my key files, API keys, etc. are not synced to Dropbox.)
To be honest, I haven't tried storing git repos on Dropbox so these are just my assumptions based on dropbox usage for other files. I am just afraid that it may end up corrupting my git repo.
First of all, Dropbox will not overwrite data. If it finds a conflict, it will save a second file with "[machine name]'s Conflicted Copy" and the modification date at the end.
This hasn't happened to me with any git files yet, however, because my machines are always online. That means my working tree is always the same across devices and my .git folder is always identical.
The only way a conflict would be created is if I committed while working offline and then committed on another machine while working offline.
If that happens, I could just grep my Dropbox folder for files with "conflicted" in the name and remove them. Or, because I committed my files to a remote (often Github, but sometimes others), I could just delete the local copy and clone.
Time before when Canonical announce Ubuntu One was going to be discontinued I comment how I depend on U1 to deploy my static websites, like 30 static websites some of them with simple .php scripts that manage contact forms or feed aggregation, it's pretty easy to do and still don't get why so much people put so much effort on making it a SaaS, we are talking about a little sysadmin work.
I have no option that use Dropbox as a backend as most of my clients use it, but it's pretty obvious you can setup the same features with other services.
however, thank you for the progress thus far.
Thanks for the feedback :)
I would love to hear about features which might make you consider this service.
One positive point is I got basic idea on what the site is and how to use it in minutes.
My feedback is that I don't have any pain points with my current work-flow. I would fear your service & dropbox to actually cause problems and be less useful than git.
Sorry to be a downer :) What advantages do you think your service would offer me?
If its for designers, then with a better tag-line, I expect you can make creating a website from a drop-box folder sound like magic.
My suggestion would be rephrasing without mentioning AWS (unless it's a specific user-level features like "upload to your own S3 bucket" or something like that).