>At the core, it's just an Ubuntu machine with a web server that hosts a dashboard and routes HTTP(s) requests to containerized apps.
So no fail over/redundancy? I think at minimum it should be two machines, so one can break. That is one of the important features of cloud applications as far as I'm concerned.
You don't have to deal with the problem of a single computer breaking.
This also adds a lot of moving parts and failure modes. For self-hosting I’d rather have downtime on a simple system that’s easy to fix rather than a complex setup that stays up but needs more maintenance when some component fails.
I think the time for this space is here. The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever.
Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry.
"We (Imbue, the company I work for) also offer a managed version, which I think is really important to making this widely accessible - and it gives us a straightforward business model to support the project."
Looking at your hosted page, I see no reference to backups. I see in your docs reference to backup, but you should definitely offer some sort of turnkey, appropriately-marked-up backup solution. Configuration difficulty is what kills self-hosting on the front end, updates make it hard over time, but when it all dies and then I have no backup is when I give up.
I can't find any reference to disk size limits anywhere. Can I host Immich on this? Can I host my media server? What will it cost? Surely not $10/month for my media collection. I'm not a hoarder and mostly have stuff ripped from my personally-owned media, which limits the size, and you're still not hosting that for $10/month. I see you have Jellyfin in the set of apps but I don't know what it will cost. The CPU & RAM limits I understand from the deploy page.
Oh, and I'm specifically referring to your hosted service here.
(author here) Thanks for flagging, I should make this more clear. Our managed instances have pretty small disks (~50GB), but there's a way to link a S3 bucket to your instance to use for bulk data storage. Apps that store bulk data (like immich/jellyfin) should automatically put it in the "archive data tier" which can be configured to go into this S3 bucket instead of local storage. We're planning to make this (and backups) an auto-configured part of our managed instances - billed separately (so you pay for just the additional storage you use; cloudflare R2 (S3 compatible) at-cost is like $15/TB/mo so it should be in that neighborhood).
> In the pre-cloud days, open source worked - authors distributed their software, and everyone "hosted" it for themselves (i.e. ran it on their own PC)
This is just rose tinted vision of the past. None of the software of the past had the capability, reliability or robustness of modern sass.
An aside: Fantastico was such a wonderful piece of software for me to learn and toy and tinker with web stuff. I was so impressed by the simplicity of it. (I phased out of the shared scene a almost two decades ago; I guess everyone moved to Softaculous, https://softaculous.com/fantastico/)
How do I reach out to you? We're building something that you might want to be a part of. (The "Safebox" comes with all the software you need, and you can just clone its AMI on AWS etc.) Would love to have a conversation.
>At the core, it's just an Ubuntu machine with a web server that hosts a dashboard and routes HTTP(s) requests to containerized apps.
So no fail over/redundancy? I think at minimum it should be two machines, so one can break. That is one of the important features of cloud applications as far as I'm concerned.
You don't have to deal with the problem of a single computer breaking.
This also adds a lot of moving parts and failure modes. For self-hosting I’d rather have downtime on a simple system that’s easy to fix rather than a complex setup that stays up but needs more maintenance when some component fails.
I think the time for this space is here. The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever.
Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry.
> The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever.
Only here, the general public don't care, they don't even know the name of their web browser.
Whatever you do don't put family on this, you'll be hated forever if there's a problem and they lose data.
But this is a company building on AI.
"We (Imbue, the company I work for) also offer a managed version, which I think is really important to making this widely accessible - and it gives us a straightforward business model to support the project."
Looking at your hosted page, I see no reference to backups. I see in your docs reference to backup, but you should definitely offer some sort of turnkey, appropriately-marked-up backup solution. Configuration difficulty is what kills self-hosting on the front end, updates make it hard over time, but when it all dies and then I have no backup is when I give up.
I can't find any reference to disk size limits anywhere. Can I host Immich on this? Can I host my media server? What will it cost? Surely not $10/month for my media collection. I'm not a hoarder and mostly have stuff ripped from my personally-owned media, which limits the size, and you're still not hosting that for $10/month. I see you have Jellyfin in the set of apps but I don't know what it will cost. The CPU & RAM limits I understand from the deploy page.
Oh, and I'm specifically referring to your hosted service here.
(author here) Thanks for flagging, I should make this more clear. Our managed instances have pretty small disks (~50GB), but there's a way to link a S3 bucket to your instance to use for bulk data storage. Apps that store bulk data (like immich/jellyfin) should automatically put it in the "archive data tier" which can be configured to go into this S3 bucket instead of local storage. We're planning to make this (and backups) an auto-configured part of our managed instances - billed separately (so you pay for just the additional storage you use; cloudflare R2 (S3 compatible) at-cost is like $15/TB/mo so it should be in that neighborhood).
See docs on how this works: https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/how_it_works/data.html#the-a...
> In the pre-cloud days, open source worked - authors distributed their software, and everyone "hosted" it for themselves (i.e. ran it on their own PC)
This is just rose tinted vision of the past. None of the software of the past had the capability, reliability or robustness of modern sass.
I'm rather baffled by that statement, with docker its...as easy as its ever been
Docker was first released 11 years after AWS though, so I'm not really sure that it counts as "pre-cloud".
Regardless, I agree that Docker has made self-hosting stuff pretty easy, and arguably even easier than it was in the pre-cloud days.
"capability, reliability or robustness" has nothing to do with ease.
that statement does not make any claims about capability, reliability or robustness. the claims are rather cost and independence.
An aside: Fantastico was such a wonderful piece of software for me to learn and toy and tinker with web stuff. I was so impressed by the simplicity of it. (I phased out of the shared scene a almost two decades ago; I guess everyone moved to Softaculous, https://softaculous.com/fantastico/)
It's weird seeing someone trying to promote self-hosting, while building everything with Claude.
Does self-hosting need to be all or nothing?
I didn’t get that from their comment at all
In case someone is asking: THIS is what a launch article should be like. 10/10.
How do I reach out to you? We're building something that you might want to be a part of. (The "Safebox" comes with all the software you need, and you can just clone its AMI on AWS etc.) Would love to have a conversation.
If you want to message me, find my email on https://qbix.com/about