What problems do you have with your domain names, hosting, etc.?
I'm currently working through some ideas with a business partner. We've both got experience in hosting, domain registration, DNS, email, web ops stuff.
Most products out there are either open-source "learn it all yourself 🛠", or "here's an enterprise solution 🤑". Few half-way houses for intelligent-but-busy Indiehackers!
Do you agree? What problems do you face that you might be interested in experienced, tech-savvy experts solving for you cost-effectively? Got too many domains and struggle to manage them? 📚Spending too much on hosting? 💸Not sure how to get your email away from Google but still be stable? 🕵️♂️ Something else? 💡
Good ideas might have their creators approached for free beta trials in a couple of months - if not by us, but by others stalking the forum! 😉
Hosting for small static sites. Let's call it "micro hosting". Seems there aren't many options for this beyond github pages or S3. My wife has a small business webpage that could use something like this. No blog, no need for a database -- just a few pages, very seldom updated. There's not much middle ground between free and $10 per month.
I love this idea. What sort of total file size limit or bandwidth limit do you think would be acceptable for a few dollars a month, or even a year? I'm doing the numbers in my head and thinking bandwidth is where it'll hurt if you're crazy popular, but quite generous limits could be created. Web-based editor, FTP, SFTP, etc. as deployment options? Or just upload a zip? I really like it as something we can do really well, really cheaply, and quite quickly.
My own side project page is hosted on github pages, so essentially I just have 5 or 6 html pages plus one single image file for the logo, and that's it. I have a product video on vimeo, and that's it.
It's easy for me to host it on github pages, but less technical folks don't have such an option. I remember the Cactus OSX app was a neat static site generator that pushed HTML to S3, which was a neat idea -- but it is no longer maintained.
I'm just wondering what is wrong with GitHub pages? It's blazingly fast, free support for your own domain. Includes a web editor, GIT and if you download GitHub Desktop even a FTP clone.
Additionally also supports free SSL now, unlimited bandwith and if you end up wanting to run a blog, you can do that too.
The only potential downside is that your website is open source if you don't run on a premium account.
There is no problem for me with Github pages, in fact it is exactly what I use for my side project twentyweeks.com. But for any non-technical folks looking to host a similarly small simple/static site they are sh*t out of luck, and probably have to opt for wordpress or wix subscriptions, even if they have a simple 100kb site with just index.html, about.html, and contact.html.
Your comment reminds me of this HN comment when Dropbox was launched :-)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
There are a lot of people out there who want simple static websites, but have no idea with github pages is, would not know how to operate git, and that they are not clear if this is appropriate to them. Github pages is fine for a specific market, but most people aren't in that market.
If it works for you: great! I think there is another market out there.
Sure, but I'd be so bold and say if you know how to build an acceptable site with HTML/CSS, you should be able to upload a file through a web interface. At this point it's more an advertisment issue than anything else, which any new player will face as well. If all the '15 best free hosting services' would list GitHub pages, it'd still be one of the easiest ways to launch a website. Literally upload the files and click launch. It works the exactly same way that you are suggesting it.
EDIT: GitHub Pages changed a lot in the past year. You don't even have to have Git on your system anymore. You can do it all through the web interface or desktop app. There are 100s of tutorials out there.
For people who don't know how to build their own site, there's Wix, Landen, ...
How do i check domain expiration and buying using API?
Ah, the golden question. We actually used to run a name dropping service where for .uk domains which was moderately successful. I wonder if we couldn't dust off the code and make it a bit more self-service and adapt it for other TLDs. Thanks for the suggestion!
Namecheap becoming slower and slower to use, but I have more than 30 domains on there and essentially too lazy to transfer them all by hand. Would totally pay something to have it automated.
I currently forward most of my domain emails to my gmail address. I love Inbox and most other webmail clients look like straight out of the 20th century. An easy to use, preferably free, modern looking mailbox I can point my domains to would be amazing.
It's just getting so incredibly hard to find a good, short domain name, even with .io and .co. Currently my process is to use namecheaps bulk search, look for .com, .io and .co and just type in 100s of words.
Finding good domains is always tricky. I have some ideas on that front actually, that I never turned into real code. The problem is the monetisation route is paved with issues: nobody wants to pay for the service itself, and once we've helped identify a good domain you're likely to go off to your existing registrar. Sounds like a feature of a domain registrar rather than a service in itself.
What are you using name cheap for? Just registration, or DNS as well?
Thanks for your suggestions. I think we'll leave taking on Gmail and inbox (which I agree is great), as a "one day, perhaps" idea. :-D
I found this domain aggregator which makes you choose your preferred registrar at the beginning and then just uses their referral URL, easy enough.
I have some apps which are more important where I use cloudflare for DNS. I don't see how you could make things easier than cloudflare though. Their setup is a breeze and if you don't mind using a different email for each project, it's also free.
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There's a bit of a history with this. Firstly, for some years registrations were "subsidised" by lock-ins on registrations and renewal fees. One major UK ISP would allow you to register a domain for £0.01 (1 pence, literally), but after 2 years would charge you £30-£100 for various services you didn't want. If you'd just paid £10 in the first place, you'd have been much better off but you were grabbed by that cheapest initial fee, huh?
Transfer is actually basically free, and mostly automatic for the registrars. Are you referring to the fact that you would find transfer a bit hairy yourself, so it would put you off?
That's an interesting problem to try and help people with, if so...