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Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

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Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#31

Post by mantoto »

reillychase wrote: post #16
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, m…

Cool. Nice little business you build there :)

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#33

Post by v0tary »

joecot wrote: post #26

Question, since a number of folks have chimed in about using various cloud hosted controllers: how do you initially setup the network (given that you presumably need the router to have internet access to connect to the cloud controller), and how do you handle it if there's an internet connectivity problem? My office currently has an internal network VM that runs the controller, and we might move to a Cloud Key, but I…

Devices keep running even if the controller goes down. Just no Config updates during outage unless you connect directly to device and change there.

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#35

Post by shankspeaks »

mkhpalm wrote: post #28
paulgerhardt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 neede…

They have a UDM and UDM-Pro in early acces that handles the all-in-one device scenario you mentioned.

I'm not sure if this all-in-one game is going to work. IMO, Unifi's hardware apart from their Wireless offerings is limited compared to other players in a similar price range. They should stick to what they're best at, which for me is their Wireless range and build around that.

In our case, we ended up using Mikrotik devices for our physical layers and Unifi as our APs. So far, the performance of the Wifi devices is excellent (though tuning high density configs was a bit of a pain), and the Mikrotiks give us exceptional control over the behaviour of the network topology.

Playing to the strengths of each vendor was the way to go for us. Worked out way cheaper as well.

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#36

Post by shankspeaks »

mister_hn wrote: post #32

Hi, would you make this also as a downloadable and on-premise version to run on my own homelab? That would be cool!

I doubt it would make sense for them to do it. Most of the heavy lifting is from the controller which you could run anyway on prem and for FREE.

The cloud deployment AFAIK would allow for better multi-tenant management, and SaaSifying the management experience.

From personal experience, running the controller on a Pi in your home network is good enough for most scenarios. Plus if you want to customize, you can poke around the APIs and wire up what you want. It's pretty powerful once you get the hang of it, and there are some fabulous libraries available thanks to community contributions on Github.

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#38

Post by xoa »

throwaway380280 wrote: post #25
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…

"Something is going to have to give at some point." Former Ubiquiti employee here. The CEO is insanely toxic. Insulting people in the company Slack, publicly firing people on the spot, constantly trying to micromanage everything, shutting down entire offices without warning. It's crazy. So much wasted potential. Most of the good employees left or were fired while i was there. Projects were changed or cancelled monthl…

Late, but thank you for sharing that. I participated and enjoyed the old community a lot, and was a big proponent of UBNT gear for many years. Seeing the downward spiral commence from the outside has been a real downer and I wondered what was going on internally. I figured it had to be something at the management level, but I'm bummed to have it confirmed nonetheless. Appreciate all the hard work you folks put in over the years, it was fantastic kit and a really promising overall solution. I wish there was something comparable, or that maybe Robert Para would finally step down/get pushed out.

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#39

Post by tbyehl »

throwaway380280 wrote: post #25
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…

"Something is going to have to give at some point." Former Ubiquiti employee here. The CEO is insanely toxic. Insulting people in the company Slack, publicly firing people on the spot, constantly trying to micromanage everything, shutting down entire offices without warning. It's crazy. So much wasted potential. Most of the good employees left or were fired while i was there. Projects were changed or cancelled monthl…

Robert Pera throwing the mFI team under the bus was super classy. Worst. EOL. EVER.

https://community.ui.com/questions/is-MFI-dead/2b4211ee-98c1...

UDM and Protect are shining examples of "never rewrite your product from scratch." USG XG was an unmitigated disaster. Dropping controller support for Broadcom-based APs was ridiculous. All seem to be technical debt driven decisions.

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#40

Post by reillychase »

joecot wrote: post #26

Question, since a number of folks have chimed in about using various cloud hosted controllers: how do you initially setup the network (given that you presumably need the router to have internet access to connect to the cloud controller), and how do you handle it if there's an internet connectivity problem? My office currently has an internal network VM that runs the controller, and we might move to a Cloud Key, but I…

Hi Joe! At https://hostifi.net we have tons of people using the USGs and connecting them to the cloud server. The USG actually is the only UniFi device that has a web gui and it has configuration options for setting up the WAN before you adopt it specifically to solve that problem - how to get internet up so you can adopt to a cloud server.

If you have a couple static IPs at one site though, keep in mind that the USG can only do one static IP (without having to dive into CLI), so for any more advanced network like that most people are using a different router vendor but sticking with the UAPs and UniFi switches for the rest of the network.

We also have lots of people using both the built-in hotspot portal pages as well as external portals just fine.

As others have mentioned, if the controller goes down, the networks do not go down. All of the device settings are stored locally and don't depend on the controller, the only exception being that the hotspot pages do require the controller to be online in order to work.

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