Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

> coolify: hosts containerized apps, but every app is an island with its own login and little integration with the host or other apps.

That’s not an issue tho, I want each application to be a separate login, so I can have one pointed to a different subdomain or domain not all in one login and location.

> nextcloud: slow and unreliable, and more enterprise-targeted now

What a load of bull.

I've been interested in something like this for awhile. Cloud or self hosting in-a-box. Should be simple for layman.

Seems weird not to mention Umbrel.

yunohost?

I remember back when I first got into self-hosting (over a decade ago), I had a Netgear READYNAS. People made a small amount of plugins you could install. But the CPU was ARM before that was cool (I think mine was actually SPARC!) so it was a lot of effort to get things to compile, so plugins were usually quite outdated.

Then I decided to painfully break out of vendor lock-in, built my own NAS with FreeNAS which was all the rage (still attached to a vendor, but at least I could control the hardware). This was before Docker really took off - the plugins were installed in FreeBSD jails. It worked for a while, but again, plugins could be woefully out of date and broken, upgrading the OS was a pain and would break all your plugins.

Through the 10+ years of this... I now follow two simple rules: - separate your network storage and application hosting. Yes, it complicates things a little bit with NFS setups but it is a forcing function for a more resilient setup - use the docker container provided by the maintainers or LinuxServer.io. Vendor maintained wrappers can be initially helpful but end up as a form of tech debt when they're abandoned or neutered - especially when they're freemium and the company starts looking to squeeze.

The quiet part of self-hosting is that it shifts the responsibility of security to the user. I'm sure cloudinabottle has more sensible defaults than provided docker containers, or builds in reverse proxies etc, but I doubt they're offering to take on liability for data loss or breaches.

The problem I see you'll face are two-fold: 1. Projects like this have the power users self-select away from it and those who need a lot of hand-holding to self-select into it. If I know how to configure and deploy a docker container already I have no incentive to contribute. ReadyNAS got around this by having folks charge for their plugins (that were just OSS projects packaged up for their OS) but then it ruins the appeal, they likely only got away with it because they were only a couple of bucks and you were already locked in to the ecosystem via the hardware. 2. If the hosted aspect actually makes you money, required for the project to be continued long term, capitalism will ensure that incumbent cloud providers take that away from you by offering ready-made instances at your cost-price, like they did with redis, elasticsearch etc.

Note that these are only issues if you're motivated by making a profit, or even a cost-neutral project. But if this is a charitable exercise backed by an entity that doesn't need the money, I wish you all the best - more things that let people dip their toes in are good! The cloud is all rent-seeking subscriptions and even with the recent supply shortages: fast, small, low-power compute is incredibly cheap these days, especially old business/mini machines.

"Forjejo"

No offense, but this is not accessible to everyone. Seriously, take a look at the setup instructions and tell me with a straight face that a 4 year old could set this up.

https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/setup/shared_homeserver.html

There's no reason this couldn't be made as simple as double clicking a .exe and then the whole thing gets setup.

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

It's weird seeing someone trying to promote self-hosting, while building everything with Claude.

> 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.

Never thought that people on HN would be seriously discussing an obviously vibe coded thing.