nebulon

Author here. The project itself is now one year old, originally written to fit exactly the needs of two people, who were frustrated with too much structure with other note-taking or just thought dump apps. So this app does not have any concept of types or even titles. Same way tags are simply extracted without the need to select a category/tag a note belongs to.

Any feedback is highly appreciated.

You could also checkout https://cloudron.io we do try to make it a lot more user friendly and approachable to self-host your blog and lots of other app categories. I think once self-hosting such apps doesn't require much technical knowledge anymore, it removes a lot of friction for users.

We do have plans to support other VPS providers soon for self-hosting. DigitalOcean most likely to be the next one, as we already have great experience with their instances. However we will support providers depending on user requests, so lets us know which ones you would like to see.

Could you clarify a bit on that? I might not fully understand what additional security sandstorm gives here. Would those login security issues be mitigated once Cloudron has 2fa implemented?

Thanks for the hint about messaging. I guess we haven't seen it as a huge PR thing for us, as it is more like the natural thing, coming from an all open source environment anyways. We just had no time/focus to do it till now and until recently the code itself it was pretty useless as such for others. With the AWS self-hosting only the first step is done to help people use it in their own way.

Hi co-founder here. We do follow a similar goal than sandstorm does, however I think our approaches are quite a bit different.

From your example, we do not have any 3rd party services integrated and it does not even fit into our idea, but instead have single sign-on for all apps bound to your own Cloudron user management. In fact your own Cloudron is for example an LDAP and OAuth provider on its own for the installed apps.

Regarding your high friction to get going, we only now started to support self-hosting outside of our managed version, so there are still rough edges as well, but that is what we are focusing on next. This is also one of the reasons, we only currently support AWS (even though other providers are in the works), the setup to get to your Cloudron should be easy, afterall that is one of the main goals to make self-hosting easy. If you have more feedback in that area, that would be great.

Hi, so far owncloud and nextcloud are still pretty much the same after their fork, however nextcloud seems to pursue a more complete personal cloud solution, with lots of other addons/apps like an openstreetmap or email UI. I use owncloud on a daily basis through my Cloudron and it is pretty good, especially given the file-syncing from my phone (Android). I did use seafile as well some time ago, but I found the UI quite a bit confusing, less focused on what I needed, which was file-syncing.

From my experience at cloudron.io this is hardly true. I feel there is lots of misinformation spread about the new VAT rules. I don't know how the situation is outside of Germany, but the process here is super straightforwards. In fact it is easier to report taxes in other EU countries as it is in Germany itself. Using the Mini One Stop Shop system you have a central entity to report them and the provided webinterface to do so is simple.

You are making a valid point and there might be nothing to gain remaining closed. We are not against open sourcing the code either, the main reason is that it is not on our radar, simply because we focus on building the platform and open sourcing it would be a distraction just now. There is no reason this might not happen in the future, but it will require a larger effort to focus on putting processes and tooling for the community in place, to really take advantage of open sourcing it.

Hi. We try to ease the managing of basic server installs with our Cloudron platform as well, but take a different route than Sandstorm. https://cloudron.io/ Personally selfhosting blogs and other things was the main driver why to work towards our product. Playing sysadmin and maintaining those selfhosted apps, taking care of domains and certs...all that is just not very much fun for me after having it done once :-)

It is down for me here in Germany as well.

Just posting the status link http://status.twitter.com/ They are aware.

seems to be back up again now, it was down for like 10min for me

Same here

Went to green again and it seems to be resolved.

Same here, first it only affected some dev deployment (s3+cdn), now it spilled over to other buckets :-/

VPS only gets you a server. If you were to install apps (gitlab or wordpress or a wiki) on your server, you need to take care of keeping the server updated, the apps updated, backing up the apps, configuring dns, installing certs. etc. In addition, each of the apps need authentication as well.

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.

Sure thing. I just checked and we have multiple email ids with your first name. Can you send me a mail? Thanks!

Compared to bitnami, we focus on the convenient installation of apps into your cloud. This includes also updates, backup and single-sign-on. See https://cloudron.io/features.html. We do not focus on virtual machine images that can be launched on your favorite IaaS.

Not currently, but we will be working with VPS providers to provide this option.

Thanks for your enthusiasm! Let me at johannes@cloudron.io know if you haven't received the invite. Looking forward to any feedback from your side.

If we take the term "private" to an extreme, you are absolutely right. We took the term in a similar way as it is used with virtual private servers. Also our business model will be based on providing the logistics around a private cloud, which focuses on convenience.

While the features you list are important and true, our main focus is on convenience. To be able setup your personal cloud without deep technical knowledge. You can read up our intentions at https://dev.cloudron.io/about.html

From a developer point of view we try to keep changes required for existing apps to be ported to a minimum. To achieve this, we use docker as well as an heroku inspired deployment approach.

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

From what I understand cozy.io and cloudstead.io are focusing on specific services around personal information, like owncloud. Our architecture allows installing arbitrary apps like owncloud as an app. Cozy.io and cloudstead.io would not have gogs or gitlab as apps.

Sandstorm and us are trying to solve very similar issues, but the approach and architecture is different.

We do not run physical servers and have only virtual separation between users. Thanks for the input, we will work to clarify that. Please see https://www.cloudron.io/faq.html

Thanks for hint, the video was taken by me from a developer build. We have not yet figured out the pricing model.

Hi, sorry for not listing them yet. We are currently not able to provide any numbers, as we are figuring out how much resources the various models will need.

Hi everyone, co-founder here. We are now in developer beta. Please request an invite if you would like to develop Cloudron apps. https://www.cloudron.io/documentation.html

Hi everyone, Co-founder of Cloudron here. We are just getting started and in closed beta for developers. I am happy to answer any questions.

Great project! That can be really useful for rooms in retirement homes being equipped with such devices.

Regarding the voice controls on either Android or iOS I can only imagine how well that would work for my grandparents, speaking a German dialect, given that even my (way less dialect) German is a hassle with voice input on either those systems.