Show HN: Cloudron – Get Your Own Cloud
cloudron.io
cloudron.io
I would fix this, you don't want to give people any wrong ideas about your price model if you haven't finalized it yet.
The software and setup ease, from what I'm able to read, seems pretty nifty. There's a good product here just be careful not to sell yourself short.
From a product identification point of view, I think it would be good for you to list the specifications (at least hard drive space for example) of the VPS you're using in the backend. It would only make sense especially for some of the apps you want to provide such as OwnCloud which is basically to stores files and such.
These were just some thoughts from a first look at the site, take them with a grain of salt.
james -at- royalholdings.net
Which is also likely to be against the contract you signed with your ISP unless you bought a business line.
This is the pain we intend to solve - you can install apps from our App Store. We take care of backups, updates, dns, certs etc. You can install apps using the same set of credentials / single Sign On. You can read more at https://cloudron.io/features.html.
Think of this as a 'smart server', a server intended to be used by anyone without deep technical knowledge (or doesn't want to put in the effort of self-hosting).
There's also a video on the landing page, please check it out.
See the co-founder in the comments. nebulon, would you clarify if it's physical and how do the boxes interface at the networking layer? That would be a start on upper-bounds of security.
You people should be targeting professional photographers, smug mug and friends offer really limited functionality to content owners who really should control their own material.
Sandstorm and us are trying to solve very similar issues, but the approach and architecture is different.
Sandstorm have their own containerization.
You can see how much porting effort is required for Cloudron, by looking at our current samples of ported apps https://www.cloudron.io/documentation.html#samples
http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers
The physical separation is a prerequisite for any real security as you need control over what executes in the box and definitely don't want untrusted processes sharing resources outside of what's already in TCB. Combining a rapid-provisioning, paid-hourly, physical hosting solution with strong privacy policies (e.g. MyKolab's) and terms of service backed by contract would be an awesome offing for a niche market.
The niche, off top of head, is essentially two groups: (a) people needing temporary and/or scalable resources for operation on private data; (b) people wanting steady, scalable, private servers who don't want to go all out on running their own. Category (b) would put the physical cloud in competition with with dedicated, hosting market. Potential advantages are manageability, scaling, cost reduction due to pay-per-use, and integration with popular cloud tech (eg Docker) pre-installed on that server. So, anyone looking for a business plan to submit to YCombinator feel free to do an assessment of this market as I think it has potential. The existence of the above company confirms that but I can't say how big this niche is.
They don't have physical servers, he's already answered that in your last comment. Each user is going to get their own VPS through AWS or another provider, so most likely these "hosts" are technically physically separated.
This service is basically a drag and drop app foundation, its a glorified SaaS. It's adding a layer of ease between having to purchase your own VPS and deploy these apps. Now someone can just purchase through this service, get their VPS purchased for them and deployed with a nice interface that magically sets up software.
What you're mentioning is an entirely different business plan on its own. You're talking about buying physical hardware, servers, switches, etc. Which would require setting up VLans...etc for true separation.
Cloudron is making an argument about privacy through the features they offer. I'm sure they would have loved to buy hundreds of servers and allow for everyone to have their own little Fort Knox in a Box but this is unobtainable from their viewpoint. They've come up with compromises to create a unified and monetarily obtainable product.
A good product is a compromise between what's needed, and what's available. You can't make something out of nothing (most of the time). If the resources aren't available, or if implementability isn't possible then you start to compromise. This is what happened here. Two guys who had a similar idea of privacy wanted to get together to provide a nice server/cloud service, and this cool little website is the result of that. Maybe in the future they can get their Fort Knox going, but for right now I don't see that happening because of the costs associated with it.
So, far from a gripe at Cloudron, this second comment is for HN readers who were looking for what I was looking for. Also found the appropriate buzzword ("bare metal") to help them find comparable offerings. Far as Cloudron, the co-founder already helpfully told me what their goals/market were, they made sense, and I wished them well on that. That I had nothing more to say on that tangent is why I made a separate comment for bare-metal, cloud hosting.
Great Job!