Would you pay for a self-hosted service?
Hey IH! Recently, I read a tweet about somebody buying a URL shortening service so that they could use it to power their own business. It got me thinking:
Why didn't the buyer just subscribe for a URL shortening service with branded link feature instead? Is it because of cost?
Is there a market where people pay a 1-time fee for a 1-click deploy service? In this case, the buyer would have to self-host & manage this service.
The value provided by the 1-click deploy service would then be - saving the buyer headaches of having to go through the tedious deployment steps. Though self-hosting can potentially come with a lot more headaches for users, it could be more financially affordable in the long run (arguable).
Some scenario:
For example, you're a blogger. You would like to self-host your own WordPress/Ghost blog rather than using the paid/managed version for (e.g., $20/mo). In that case, going for the self-hosting route would mean you will have to set up and pay for cloud services such as AWS/Digital Ocean, etc. Rather than having to go through all these hassles to set up the DNS and other configurations, etc., somebody out there offers a 1 click deploy service (say, $20 per deployment) that does all these for you.
Obviously, there are solutions as such out there for free. However, they are not truly 1 click as you would still need to perform some additional setup, e.g. SSH into the VPS, etc. The idea comes with the assumption that the 1-click deployment would abstract all these.
What are your thoughts? Would you pay a 1-time fee for 1-click deployment?
The problem I see with a 1-click deploy service is that software needs updating over time. You may create a new shiny Wordpress VPS box today, but two weeks later there will be a new Wordpress version released, possibly to fix some critical security bug.
So either the users are comfortable with SSHing into the VPS and updating the software, in which case they can also deploy Wordpress themselves the first time, or they're not, in which case they should use a fully managed service.
Yeah, whatever you said makes a lot of sense. Having to self-manage my own sites, I feel that there's almost no place for in-between solutions as such Though I really wanted to validate that I'm alone in thinking that way.
If I were to delegate 1-click deploy service to somebody else, that would also mean that I'm not comfortable with SSHing into my own VPS to perform the much-needed maintenance work/updates later down the road.
Thanks for the reply!