A while back I installed ServerPilot which automatically sets up Nginx/Apache/PHP/MySQL for you. It also handles security updates. This made those $5 VPS' so much more appealing [1] as I could install lots of small Node.js apps on a single server, and avoid managed hosting providers who seem to prefer charging per app instance.

Anyway ServerPilot then scrapped their free plan so I've been looking for an alternative. cloudron looks cool, I don't see anything specific to Node.js/Express, but it does have a LAMP stack which includes Apache, so I might try that. Otherwise I'll probably use something like CapRover [2], a self-hosted platform as a service.

[1] https://twitter.com/umaar/status/1256155563748139009

[2] https://caprover.com/

Dokku is an excellent option for this sort of thing, and manages subdomains for you.

http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/

And SSL is a cinch! I have been very happy with Dokku, I'm surprised I don't see it mentioned around here more often.

Would love to get your opinion as I'm building a competing product to ServerPilot in this space. Is the $5 too expensive for the service? or is it just too expensive because the billing increases as you have more servers under management, and they charge you per app as well?

Are there features ServerPilot is missing that would justify the price more for you? Some examples might be monitoring, analytics, automated security patching, containerization of workloads, etc.

Would the plan be more appealing if the cost of the plan, the portal, and the VM hosting itself were all rolled into one? (i.e. you would just pay one company, rather than having to sign up for DO as well as ServerPilot).

1) Independence of hosting provider is a must. Don't want to be forced to use your VPS service when I have all my infrastructure already on Linode, DO, Vultr, etc.

2) Should be free when used in non-commercial applications. Multiple servers included.

3) Keep the common and already available typical configurations free: lamp, lemp, python, letsencrypt, email. Charge for things which no other panel free or otherwise typically supports. lightspeed, go, caddy, load balancing, sql replication, graphql, etc. Thats value.

"Self-hosting apps is time consuming and error-prone. Keeping your system up-to-date and secure is a full-time job. Cloudron lets you focus on using the apps and not worry about system administration."

neat, don't think I've seen something like this before!

It kind of just looks like a simplified version of CPanel which has been on every VPS for the last 20+ years.

"simplified version of CPanel" is something neat that I haven't seen before

in addition, sometimes people don't know things that you know, and you would do well to keep that in mind: https://xkcd.com/1053/

They'd be so much more successful, if "Install" button did not have this:

  wget https://cloudron.io/cloudron-setup
  chmod +x ./cloudron-setup
  ./cloudron-setup --provider [digitalocean,ec2,generic,ovh,...]

There's a cloudron 1-click image on Digital Ocean

Which, as a regular user, I don't understand when I see it.

Hell, I am a dev, and I still did not know that will let me create one quickly.

Agreed. Do you have any suggestions to improve the initial onboarding?

Ideally:

- user picks a cloud (or have a "Advanced" option on the next step instead)

- you show them OpenID/OAuth form for their cloud provider

- guide them through the creation of an account if necessary

- you get the token, that permits your server to create cloud resources on behalf of the user

- you go ahead and create their services for them

- potentially store the token to be able to update the apps automatically

I thought about that, when I was considering to make a similar service (also similar to sandstorm.io). Glad to see somebody doing something in that area (I guess without the permissions model yet).

Problem is: most clouds don't let you easily create an account, so "guide them through the creation of an account" might be impossible without leaving the browser.

Ahoy gramakri.

I have been a Cloudron user for a bit of time. Recently I have launched a company and we're now a paying and very happy customer of Cloudron's business subscription.

It seems that the "next app suggestion" process have stalled. To me as an outsider of your internal process, I cannot see what applications are being preferred over others. There are tons of very good suggestions which are not receiving traction it seems, from the app suggestion-forum.

A few examples which Cloudron needs, and would benefit from having attracting more users:

- A Wireguard VPN frontend application

- Jupyter Notebooks Environment

- Odoo ERP Community edition

- Erpnext

Is that any less secure than “sudo dpkg -i foo.deb”?

It is certainly less secure, than just calling the API of those cloud providers directly from the site backend.

The subscription price is crazy now. And they don't even do hosting.

> And they don't even do hosting.

I'm pretty sure that's their whole point of existence.