Hosted Gitea

I just finished deploying a change I've been working on for weeks. Finally large storage tiers are available on Hosted Gitea! You can get 25Gb, 60Gb, or 160Gb.

Perfect for data scientists hosting large models, or game developers hosting Unity or Godot files on LFS. If you're looking for large Git repo storage space hit me up!

I've been working on the Hosted Gitea's infrastructure. This comes on the back of customer interest in new features like Git LFS (large file support) which Gitea supports natively out of the box. Here's what I worked on:

• Upgraded Gitea to a newer version on all customer machines.
• Added a custom domain option in the customer admin.
• Fixed a customer login issue for new signups.
• Fixed settings that were deprecated upstream.
• New devops scripts for executing updates on the whole VPS fleet.
• Added extra swap to all machines after I saw a crash.
• Wrote two new Gitea articles for the blog (on Gitea LFS and Gitea Docker).
• Design updates to the home page.
• Updated the FAQ with new questions from customers.

I've had a bit of interest from a new type of customer lately. These are small businesses with 10 or so developers working with large datasets. So I've been working on some infrastructure to support this use-case but adding larger storage volumes, and updating the copy to make it clear LFS is supported.

Unfortunately I also had two new signups churn immediately after they signed up. Of course I gave a refund as soon as they requested it, but it's not a good sign. The first customer ran into a bug where they couldn't log in to the admin panel immediately after signing up and saw an ugly 500 error. This was a really bad look and I prioritized a fix immediately, but the damage had been done and they asked for a refund.

The second case was somebody who only realized Hosted Gitea wasn't a good fit for what they wanted after they had signed up. They wanted more customization than we currently offer. This has led me to think about ways to allow more customization while also retaining the core value of managed hosting. I also clarified a lot of the documentation to explain how much customization is possible. Hopefully this will help people decide earlier in the process if it's not for them.

I think a lot of interest in Hosted Gitea lately comes from people who don't trust Microsoft (GitHub) with their code any more. They are worried about getting their private code sucked up by the great AIs in the sky and pasted into some other developer's codebase. This is fair enough really as we do live in weird times where this has become a definite possibility.

Anyway, that's all the Hosted Gitea stuff I've been hacking on lately. Thanks for reading!

Throughout 2022 people kept signing up to Hosted Gitea so I did a big upgrade over the new year. Here's what I changed:

• Created a new dashboard where customers can log in.
• Fixed an issue with SSL certificate renewals.
• Implemented server monitoring for customer VPSes.
• Improved upgrades infrastructure.
• Upgraded all servers to latest Gitea.
• Admin dashboard improvements to help manage the VPSes.
• Updated VPS provider API tokens.
• Sponsored the open source Gitea project using 2022's profits.

I also created a new Stripe account in order to link up the Indie Hackers MRR indicator. As the customers move across the MRR will show up here. I'm excited to see what 2023 brings for the service!

I spent the day writing a ton of new content for the Hosted Gitea blog. I wrote articles on Gitea Docker installation and setup and self-hosting a Git repo over SSH and a cool hack to show the current git branch in your terminal prompt. I also did some research and wrote a review of the various self-hosted git options available today.

Sooooooooooo it seems like GitHub is down every other day lately. If only there was a service that allowed you to run your own private Gitea server but without all the hassle of deploying and maintaining it yourself. Geez wouldn't that be wonderful. 😉

I just dropped the price from $37 to $24 so get in quick!

https://hostedgitea.com/

All the cool kids say you gotta write to get your rankings up in SEO. So yesterday I hacked out a minimal articles system and wrote three articles about git and Gitea. You can check them out over here:

https://hostedgitea.com/articles

Will post back if I see anything budge in the analytics.

A while back I wrote a post about shutting down this service. A few days later I had not yet taken the page down, when another potential customer contacted me and tried to sign up for the service.

It seems like maybe I've made a huge mistake. Second time lucky with Hosted Gitea?

I just published a completely revamped version of the landing page for my product: https://hostedgitea.com/

Under the hood the code is exactly the same. It's functionally identical to Self Hosted Git. So why the update?

Speaking to users and running ads revealed something interesting. Few people wanted the "you get root" feature. Most people just want a hosted Gitea box that I manage for them.

I'll continue to maintain the selfhostedgit.com service for people who want it. It costs me very little to have two different landing pages for what is essentially an identical product. With the new site I can try to make a more compelling message for people who just want a hassle free hosted managed Gitea server.

Any feedback on the updated copy and site is very much welcome!

Whooooooooooooooooooooooooooop!!! Yeah!

I think my first paying customer may be a reader of this site, so if it is you, please accept my gratitude. You are my VIP and I will do what it takes to make your experience a good one.

I came up with the idea for selfhostedgit.com three months ago and from the beginning it has felt different with quite a bit of validation, from search volume to landing page traction to feedback from potential customers, and the core product is right in my wheel house. All signs have been positive. Everything's coming up Milhouse!

According to this site I've attempted six products so far with varying degrees of success, but this is the first time I have had a genuine monthly subscription signup and it feels amazing!

To celebrate I'd like to offer to the next 10 people who email me, one month of free git hosting on their own Gitea VPS with no obligation. It would really help me out to get your feedback on the beta.

Thank you!

I've got the basic automation working and I had a bunch of feedback from beta users. Now I've made the suggested changes and I'm soft-launching this first version people can actually sign up to.

Keen for more constructive criticism - what could I do better to explain the value proposition? Any comments on the design, logo, etc.? Would you pay for this or not pay for this yourself? What features do you want to see?

https://selfhostedgit.com/