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Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

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Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#11

Post by Xylakant »

scohesc wrote: post #5
dsl wrote: post #2

How is this different from or any better than Ubiquiti's Cloud Controller hosting? Also based on your pricing it is cheaper to buy a Cloud Key if you plan to use your devices longer than 10 months.

Instead of having to configure potentially tens of different site-to-site VPN connections to connect every site to your head office where you controller is located, you're hosting it on the internet which makes implementation easier. I would never ever trust a Ubiquiti product being open on the internet though - especially their software products. Too many issues with their firmware on their "carrier"-classed radios,…

> Instead of having to configure potentially tens of different site-to-site VPN connections to connect every site to your head office where you controller is located, you're hosting it on the internet which makes implementation easier.

Unifi offers a cloud controller as hosted service, see https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006288413.

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#12

Post by ilikepi »

gmu3 wrote: post #8

I've been running my controller on a raspberry pi for a few years without any issues

I'd like to move mine to a Pi, but I'm a little concerned about storage. Do you store the controller database on the internal SD card or do you have it on a more robust external/network storage device?

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#13

Post by GreenJelloShot »

ilikepi wrote: post #12
gmu3 wrote: post #8

I've been running my controller on a raspberry pi for a few years without any issues

I'd like to move mine to a Pi, but I'm a little concerned about storage. Do you store the controller database on the internal SD card or do you have it on a more robust external/network storage device?

Store everything on the SD card but make sure to create a backup image, just in case.

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#15

Post by CameronBanga »

I've been using Hostifi for a year+ I think now. If anyone is looking for a similar service, I highly recommend: https://hostifi.net

Pricing is better IMO if you have any serious number of devices. The founder has created as an open startup (https://rchase.com) and has been making good profit, so less concern of it going under too. No offense to OP on that, but switching to something like this can be a bunch of time personally, so want a clear path for startup.

Finally, and this is an personal story I know. But the support on Hostifi is fantastic. They have a knowledge base and their team is more than happy to help when issues come up. Which is great because I love the software, but am not a personal expert.

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#16

Post by reillychase »

davidu wrote: post #6

This is a great passive income type of business. Here's a nearly identical version that a number of folks use: https://hostifi.net/

Thanks for the mention! It's certainly not passive though (like I thought it was going to be when I started it lol), I'm working on it 40+ hours/week and just hired our first support engineer, Safwan. He used to work for Ubiquiti support for 2 years before he joined this month. We've got over 25,000 Ubiquiti devices connected across ~600 servers. The daily work involves helping people with support questions, demos, migrations, testing UniFi updates, rolling them out to the servers, setting up SSL certs, and developing new features. We're working on a new website currently as well.

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#17

Post by xoa »

L3 hosting and UniFi is now unfortunately just one of the many, many areas where it feels like Ubiquiti just kind of quit on it many years ago. It's really unfortunate but I've really gotten that sinking feeling about the platform for the last year or two now, with their killing of the forums and no replacement/upgrade for the bug/feature tracking part being the final straw. But overall they seem to show a lot of the classic signs of basic internal dysfunction, tons of effort expended on surface gloss and re-skinning things over and over again (yet then failing to even quickly bring feature parity up), lots of basic features and even merely keeping internal components up to date disregarded, ever increasing technical debt in the hardware line due to failure to update and replace now ancient kit (which instead they still sell new at full price). Something is going to have to give at some point. Unfortunately I don't see anything else in the same position either. It's such a depressing waste of potential.

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#19

Post by paulgerhardt »

xoa wrote: post #17

L3 hosting and UniFi is now unfortunately just one of the many, many areas where it feels like Ubiquiti just kind of quit on it many years ago. It's really unfortunate but I've really gotten that sinking feeling about the platform for the last year or two now, with their killing of the forums and no replacement/upgrade for the bug/feature tracking part being the final straw. But overall they seem to show a lot of the…

I finally switched to UniFi equipment after hearing for years how much better it is than consumer WiFi equipment.

Oh man, what a headache.

Depending how one configured things, there’s at least 3 ways to provision devices - all 3 incompatible and will cause issues with each other. User manuals refer to Apps no longer in existence. In no instance have I had a “just works” experience. In two instances the option I needed to configure was not available through any of the 3 (4?) dashboards and I had to resort to sshing into the device.

4 weeks later I’m still experiencing ISP fiber modem disconnect issues every 48 hours and can not connect remotely to debug. The impression I get is 90% of the performance “gains” one gets from switching from Asus to Ubiquiti come from dedicating one $300 piece of hardware (which overheats) for each network function (firewall, switch, router, AP) rather than using a single threaded all-in-one device. Then people still bolt on accessory devices like pi-holes when a USG should be perfectly capable of performing the task.

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#20

Post by reillychase »

zamalek wrote: post #18

Nobody who has 5 devices will pay $10/mo for this; they are all doing what I am: booting the controller on-demand (or some other local solution). Less than $10pa would seem appropriate (and I'd snap that up in a heartbeat).

At https://hostifi.net we are working on 2 new plans launching soon, a 5 device $3.99/month or $39/year plan and a 3 site, 15 device plan at $9.99/month or $99/year. Trying to find the price point for those small install/home users is tricky. Our primary customers are the IT/MSP business owners who manage all of their customer networks from one server.
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