How are you hosting your sites?
I'm curious how most people are hosting their sites these days? Are you using old school shared hosting with a WordPress type site or are you using a NoCode solution? Or are you using a more modern cloud based type host?
Personally, I use a mix of VPS from companies like DigitalOcean and Linode and some shared / managed services from other providers.
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Github Pages
I always have friends ask about the easiest way to get a cheap site online and I'm always tempted to suggest Github Pages. My concern is that it may be a bit difficult for a non-technical user to initially understand so I haven't recommended it yet - I've thought about writing a guide to make it super easy for non-technical users to build the kind of site they are wanting.
My counter-argument would be: the GitHub docs are very good at explaining and there are countless of videos on YouTube on how to use GitHub pages haha :P
True, but telling my non-technical friends to go watch Youtube or linking them to the "Github Pages" section of the Github docs (when the front page of Github doesn't mention hosting a website at all and just looks like a complicated developer site) isn't what they want to hear when they are asking me if they should use Wix or GoDaddy for their new window washing business website.
I think Github Pages is a better solution for them but I'm not sure how to convey that in an easy way for them to understand without them spending a lot of time learning/researching Github Pages.
this is actually an excellent choice to host SPA
Vercel for any react project
Render for anything else
Both Vercel and Render are services I'm seeing people recommend more and more.
I recently started my own business and the hosting I found helpful was Cloudways. I heard from many of my friends that I should use a service that will be as handy as possible so that I won't get stressed about the fact I don't understand anything and so on. Before working with the hosting I mentioned before I read a cloudways review where the guy mentioned the advantages like "Cloudways is super easy, super fast and cost-effective (we run 5 sites on a single instance for 40$/month!)". I use Cloudways already for 3 months and it turned out it is indeed easy to use and you don't have to have the skills of a developer. ;)
My backend is on Digital Ocean, my front end (Vue) is being deployed/hosted using Vercel which is awesome and I’d highly recommend.
That's an interesting combination I haven't heard before.
Azure
Yeah, Azure is definitely one of the more popular options.
I just moved to firebase hosting because it is fast and easy to deploy to.
I've seen firebase grow in popularity over the years. There definitely are a lot of people who recommend it.
I built https://acrobox.io to solve this problem for myself. It provisions infrastructure on DigitalOcean and provides tools to rapidly iterate on multiple sites, services, and tasks.
I hadn't heard of your service before - it looks like an interesting solution.
Cool, thanks for taking a look. I am receptive to feedback if you're willing to share your honest thoughts, however they may be shaped. Either here or [email protected] if you're willing to share. All the best.
The first thing that really stood out to me was that it is $30 / month. I originally thought that was per server but looking closer I'm not real sure. That seems really expensive when the cheapest DigitalOcean droplet costs $5 / month (it also makes me wonder why the copy says "The defaults will cost an additional $6.10/m USD payable to DigitalOcean." - not sure why that doesn't say "$5/m USD").
Outside of price, I'm not sure why I would pay for a proprietary solution when there are free and open source solutions available. For example, CapRover (https://caprover.com/) is an open source solution that I believe does everything your service offers plus more (it has command line deployments but also has a web interface).
There are also numerous competing services from open source to paid (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31661465).
I tend to be cheap and don't pay for infrastructure services unless I find it really vital so I'm probably not the target market. That being said, I would be very wary of installing a proprietary service as the central portion of my deployment strategy. I realize a lot of people do that, for me, I would absolutely want to make sure that the service is going to be around for a long time (well funded and long term strategy). The landing page for your service does not give me that confidence.
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I wrote all of the above and just realized you have a link to Github at the bottom of the page. It doesn't mention anywhere on the page that it is open source, but it looks like it might be? If so, I'm not real clear what paying $30 provides. I don't want to pay money and then have to figure out how to install the service.
Being open source gives me a little more comfort (if you go out of business, I can look at the source code and figure out security updates if needed).
It may just be that I'm not your target market but if I'm paying $30/month, then I'm not going to want to manage it myself - I can get that with well-documented open source software mentioned above.
If everything is growing for you, then I'd say keep doing what you are doing but if not, you might want to approach it from a different angle. One approach you might consider is market the service as an open source solution with a hosted option (the Github README.md is really bare - get that filled out with details). For example, take a look at the way Plausible.io is marketed. They are open source but you can also pay to just have them host everything.
You could look into the way Cloudways.com runs their service - they basically provide management services on top of DigitalOcean, Linode, etc. Cloudways customers never even set up a DigitalOcean account, they just pay Cloudways and they manage everything. I could see a situation where your service would work well in that kind of set up (that being said, not sure if managing other people's servers is something you want to do).
All that to say, for me personally, I'm not seeing the benefits of your service in its current state compared to other free and open source solutions on the market. If I'm going to spend time figuring out how to set up a service on my server, I'm going to lean towards an open source solution that I know is going to be maintained in the long run.
Thanks for the feedback, especially at such depth. I really appreciate it.
You raise many valid points, and identify areas for documentation improvement. I will clarify here if you're interested or for anyone else that stumbles across this.
The point with Acrobox is that there is no initial server setup (ssh keys, firewall, automatic updates, automatic incremental deduped backups if you provide keys, etc). There is no installation of the Acrobox proprietary service. There is no server management. It's all configured when you
abx inita new machine. With Caprover, that's all up to you to configure. Perhaps this could be more clear on the landing page.The pricing is per server, and it defaults to provisioning the Premium Intel droplet so that's where the additional fee comes from.
abx inithas a flag to set the droplet type to use the cheaper one.Only the abx command line application is open source. The service itself is proprietary, an unfortunate side effect of the direction I took in attempt at being compensated for my work. I tried to balance that out by remaining free from lock-in, but I can absolutely see why that would turn some off. Maybe there is a better approach I haven't thought of.
I view the web-UI as an anti-feature, but I am becoming increasingly aware that I am not in the majority on this one.
I went through probably at least one hundred competitors. The thread you referenced has a handful of new (to me) ones. Thanks! It's definitely a hot area. This was my expression.
Again, thanks a lot for taking your time to provide this feedback. I have a lot of processing to do but this comment will without a doubt have an impact on the direction I take this project and ultimately my life.
For a decent normal website nothing beats odoo websites. They area Belgian open source ERP unicorn and offer a website builder like Wix or squarespace for free, on custom domain. You only pay if you start using a second module.
I've heard of odoo before but didn't realize they offered a website builder and hosting. I always have friends ask me the best way to quickly get a site online and I never have an answer I'm real happy with that would be easy for a non-technical user. I may have to check odoo out more, thanks!
For my SPA's I like use AWS CDK that I will build into the project. This means I have full IaC, all serverless pay for what you use and easy to integrate into a CICD pipeline.
The stack uses s3 as the host with CloudFront as the CDN and route 53 to link up the domain, plus I can easily add WAF ( firewall if needed ).
There is definitely a lot of power available when you combine the various AWS services. I hadn't heard of CDK before, but it definitely looks like it provides a lot of benefits.
If you work in the AWS ecosystem you 100% need to look into CDK, I don't remember the last time I used to the console to setup any services. It is just all so repeatable, I often deploy across multiple accounts ( dev, test, prod) and have full confidence now when moving a change through each of the stages.
I've been using Vercel for NextJS projects & found that it works really well.
Vercel is a service I keep seeing recommended pretty often these days (especially in connection with NextJS - I didn't realize until just now that NextJS was developed by Vercel). I'm not a big fan of React and React-like development but I can definitely see the appeal for developers who prefer that style of development.
For marketing websites I've found nothing better than https://webflow.com/. It really saves you a lot of time and the editor/designer is complex enough to allow you to do most customizations.
Yeah, that definitely seems to be a pretty popular solution these days. From what I've seen, they definitely seem to be one of the top NoCode website solutions. I've seen some really nicely designed sites from them built by people without a design or development background.
I am Python Developer and I work on Upwork, I have noticed that, if my clients own a big product having enough amount of users, they tend to host their web apps on AWS ec2 instance using PostgreSQL( these types of users can afford hosting charges as well).
And there are also some users who have their websites but tend to host on Heroku free tier using cloudflare free tier services. so requirements keep changing. are you hosting the web apps for your clients?
Yeah, some client hosting and some hosting for my own projects. These days I try to stay away from being responsible for hosting for clients (I don't want to be on call for another client's server). This last year and a half, I've built a lot of Laravel projects for clients and typically recommend Cloudways (that way Cloudways is responsible for server upkeep but the base system is an affordable, solid VPS).
For a lot of my own projects, I just run the VPS myself.
I had one client this past year where I built them a Python/Flask site. I struggled with getting them cheap, affordable solid hosting. We started with one company but ended up switching to a Dreamhost VPS that has worked out.
I personally prefer using a VPS but like you said, it seems like a lot of the popular solutions these days are things like AWS or other cloud services. It seems like Netlify has done a really impressive job staying on top of the latest trends. I see them often recommended as a default solution, especially for users with static generated sites.
One of my frustrations with cloud services is that some of them seem overly expensive. A lot of them seem to start off at a nice free tier to hook you but once you start using them seriously, the costs seem much higher to me than if you had just optimized a standalone server yourself.
well, you are right about the pricing. yes, it is true that hosting providers charge a lot when we start using them seriously.
I have developed my own website so never hosted my website because I work for the clients and I always recommend them to use AWS, although AWS can be expensive at the same time.
I have also used GCP.
But I think you can use Heroku which provides free tier services for a lifetime with Cloudflare which will also provide you with a free SSL certificate.
I can help you if you needed help.
Thanks, not looking for help with anything. I'm in the process of building some services and was just looking for a survey/feel for what people were using these days.
I was especially curious about what non-technical IndieHackers are using because it seems like there is a bit of an opportunity there for simplified hosting services. A lot of the NoCode solutions seem to be very expensive for the services they offer.
oh got it. I am not sure about other hosting services, I use AWS, heroku, GCP and I told you about them. I am sure there will be other developers as well who will express their experiences here
A combination of fly.io for applications and netlify for static sites. I let someone else deal with servers and security patching that you would have to do on DigitalOcean or similar service and it lets me focus on building.
The fly.io and netlify services definitely seems to be growing in popularity.