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Comment by ivopetkov | Hacker News Reader

Hi guys.

I would like to present you a new better solution we've developed to build websites.

The website is hosted your own server, but it's powered by our cloud services. The management tools (that's almost 95% of a typical CMS codebase) and the database are seamlessly provided by the cloud. This improves security, maintenance and helps you get new features more frequently. Also you can run custom code on your server (typically HTML, JS and CSS and now PHP). Our solution takes the best from the hosted and self-hosted worlds, and we think it's awesome.

What do you think of this approach?

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The first problem I saw was that I didn't see anything compelling about the management tools, which is really the product you're offering.

The Grid (http://thegrid.io) provides a service for generating your site and will generate static assets for you. I believe they'll host it as well, though I haven't had a chance to use it yet. Their service has a totally compelling pitch (such that they've had 10's of thousands of pre-orders).

I currently host some sites at Dreamhost. They manage my WordPress installation for me. So, it's self-hosted in that I have complete control over the files in my account but it is also automatically managed. And the WordPress is pretty capable.

In the end, I think it boils down to "who is this for?" A total tech person could just generate a site locally with jekyll and then rsync it to their server. A non-technical person would rather use Squarespace or WordPress.com and be done with it.

We think our product is perfect if you build websites for your clients and host them on different hosting accounts. They are always up-to-date.

I think it's an interesting approach but it would help if you could explain more clearly what parts you host and what parts the user hosts

We have a picture illustrating this at https://bearcms.com/help/how-bear-cms-works/ It's worth a thousand words :)

Well... that picture doesn't say anything.

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