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Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#211

Post by rubatuga »

3np wrote: post #149
rubatuga wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not directly competing with Helm, but we at Hoppy Network provide a static IP over WireGuard. It came out of a desire for "truly private email". We provide: Clean IPv4 + IPv6 address, Reverse DNS, unblocked ports, unfiltered ICMP It's priced reasonably to keep bad actors out: https://hoppy.network We have a $60/year plan in the works, which will be available before the end of this year.

Awesome, I was just looking for something like this the other day! SEO feedback: Try to be discoverable via term like "ipv4 tunnel provider", you may get more search leads. In my mind I was looking for an inverse Hurricane Electric. Also, do you have any plans at all to accept payments via cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin? That would make you guys a no-brainer.

Thanks for the SEO feedback, definitely something we will look into! We currently use Stripe, and I don't think Stripe has any plans to bring back crypto payments :(

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#212

Post by ryandrake »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #178

I used to run my own mail server for decades. I gave up when it became nearly impossible for my domain not to end up on some list or some reputation. The big cloud email providers make it a lot of work to run your own. A friend of mine tried setting up a mail server a couple of months ago at Digital Ocean on a VPS and a couple of others and his mail bounced back all over the place. I ended up with an account at one o…

Opposite example: I've hosted my own E-mail (+other services) on a $5 Linode VPS for over a decade. Initially had some deliverability problems. Read each and every failure carefully and followed the directions, and solved them all. Once, all of a sudden my IP ended up on one of the blacklists, resulting in severe deliverability problems, and I simply requested a new IP. Smooth sailing for years. My biggest E-mail headache is every six months or so, spamassassin goes out of its mind and has to be re-started. And certbot (letsencrypt) fails for some cryptic reason every time SSL renewal is up and needs to be babysat.

$5/month. That's what this product needs to beat.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#213

Post by prepend »

piaste wrote: post #150
remram wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, it is legal, but strikes me as unnecessarily unfriendly. It is likely that I have unrealistic expectations, but putting their modified source code on some "archived" GitHub or similar would have been easy and free. Looking around at Purism, Pine, and remarkable, they don't make it that easy either, so I guess my complaint shouldn't be directed at Helm specifically. My point is that we're not in 1997 anymor…

> but putting their modified source code on some "archived" GitHub or similar would have been easy and free. You still need to set up mirroring to keep it up-to-date, and janitor tags so that it matches whatever the customer actually received. Much more importantly, you run the risk of a classic 'whoops I pushed an API key' blunder if your code gets auto-mirrored to a public repo. Writing "if you're a human and you w…

> Much more importantly, you run the risk of a classic 'whoops I pushed an API key' blunder if your code gets auto-mirrored to a public repo.

Thousands of competent projects and millions of incompetent projects figured it out. This is not a reason to distribute source code digitally. Any use of this reasoning just makes the user seem stupid and unable to reduce the risk on this trivial problem.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#215

Post by tehabe »

tehabe wrote: post #201

I currently use an Synology DS116, a small and simple NAS which I mostly use to backup my Mac via Time Mashine but I can't even find if this is supported on such a machine. It seems it is an NAS but without the being called a NAS, e.g. I haven't found anything about SMB or SFTP support.

I asked and no, this device does not support SMB or SFTP. So it is worthless for me.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#217

Post by miked85 »

dsr_ wrote: post #177

Summing up: - the hardware looks okay - the mandatory subscription provides value, but if the company folds, all the services go away and there's no instructions on how to set them up yourself -- at which point you might as well have bought an RPi with a preconfig'd distro. - The selling point is "escape Big Tech" but the services are provisioned via AWS. - The CEO is arguing with people here telling them that they a…

> - The CEO is arguing with people here telling them that they are wrong about what they want.

The CEO's comments in this post should be enough to make anyone think twice before buying this product.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#218

Post by slenk »

teitoklien wrote: post #157
slenk wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah but so are AWS ips

Ive been using aws ip’s to send emails all the time Never had one flagged because of ip reputation. Both using ses and directly sending emails via a aws vps

Wow. That honestly surprises me. I had been using Linode for my mail servers because of better IP rep

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#219

Post by gen220 »

azinman2 wrote: post #155
old-gregg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a very boring and traditional way: you buy a domain name, configure dynamic DNS, and then use port forwarding in your home firewall. No 3rd party proxies.

Not sure that makes me anymore comfortable! Open port to my storage from the internet? But I’m glad they’re not backdooring anything….

To be clear, the storage app is not bound to the port, rather it’s a VPN server.

It’s how most companies operate (RBAC behind a private key challenge).

Exposing anything to the internet carries intrinsic risk, but exposing a VPN door is among the least risky of the available options, if internet accessibility is an essential feature. The only realistic compromise vectors are private key disclosure, bad VPN configs, or operating an outdated version of WireGuard with a known vulnerability.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#220

Post by tpxl »

not_exactly__ wrote: post #209
tpxl wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tbh, I don’t know why subscriptions get such a bad rap on HN Because a lot of the times things don't need a subscription, but it's just a way for the company to squeeze more money out of you. Some things you can't buy of course, like a streaming service, and I do pay for them. However, I will never 'rent' an online movie which I can only watch once or some such bullshit where the limitation is 0% technical and 100%…

> I will never rent an online movie Why not? I do it all the time for a simple economic reason: renting is $2.99 and buying is $14.99. If I haven’t seen the movie yet and I don’t feel super strongly about it, I don’t feel like paying the full price. Of course if I end up loving the movie and want to buy it, I’ll end up having spent an extra $2.99 to rent something I now plan to own. But I can’t remember ever doing th…

> Why not?

1. "Buying" is usually 15$ in my experience, not 3$.

2. Like said, the limitation is not technical, it's purely milking users.

3. I like to own stuff and sometimes play older games and watch older movies. Renting is just a non-starter for that, unless you want to overpay out the nose.

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