Hi there!
This is Girish/Johannes from Cloudron - https://cloudron.io!
We have been working on a platform that makes it easy to run apps on your server. It all started when Google Reader was shutdown :-). We initially started writing self-hosted equivalents of popular services but quickly found that there is a ton of great self-hosted software out there. It’s just a lot of work to actually run them and keep them up-to-date.
The idea with Cloudron is simple: you install the Cloudron platform on your server. You can then install apps like NextCloud, GitLab, Rocket.Chat from the App Store. Cloudron completely automates the installation. Seriously - all you have to provide is a domain to install it on and it will take care of the rest like DNS/certs, databases, sandboxing, backups, authentication etc. The App Store provides continuous updates for the apps, so you can use them like any SaaS product (this is all no different from how mobile app stores work).
Most importantly, all your data is completely private/local to the server - we don’t have access to your servers.
Our complete app list - https://cloudron.io/store/index.html.
Seeing is believing. There’s a demo at https://my-demo.cloudron.me (username/password: cloudron).
Would love to get feedback!
Concept is interesting. Biggest pain points for me are ongoing server maintenance/patching and security, if you can convince me that you have those points covered, and this makes deployment easier, than I'd probably buy.
In fact what you are referring to is exactly what we set out to solve, since we had the same pain points ourselves and thought, we cannot be the only ones around, which might enjoy a solution to them.
Tip: If what you're asking for is feedback, you should put that in your title (and earlier in your thread's text), otherwise most people will just assume you're marketing your product and ignore.
And of course, the post itself should align with what's promised in the title.
The more general lesson here is that once you put on your marketing hat, you will be tempted to think, "What do I want people to read?" every time you write. That's fine, but it should come a distant second to, "What do readers want to read?" Otherwise your writing will come off as boring at best, and spammy/self-promotional at worst. That goes for tweets, blog posts, forum posts, etc.
Thanks for all the hints, will make use of them in my next posts. I am fairly new to this community.
I really like the idea and execution. It even motivated me to stop lurking and finally creating an account here :-)
I generally prefer to be in charge of my data but as I have just limited resources as a single founder without a very profitable product, I made some compromises in the past and also used SaaS apps.
I need to have a closer look at the security and how updates/upgrades/migrations are handled, but if this is solved nicely, I will definitely consider using Cloudron.