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

cloudinabottle.org

121–130 of 342 posts

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

#121
How does it deal with storage? Storage is always the weakest link in self hosting. Having a bunch of stateless containers is ultimately just a fancy docker compose file. Still valuable, but you need a proper story for storage. Ideally all storage would be on individual volumes per app and all backed up etc.

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

#123
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Because "perfectly legal" and "socially acceptable" often diverge quite a bit. The world would be quite miserable if "perfectly legal" would be what everyone optimizes for.

> The world would be quite miserable if "perfectly legal" would be what everyone optimizes for.

what you will find is that this is what corporations optimizes for. Therefore, you as a person, cannot compete with the corp.

That's why you need to become like a corp, or make the rules "socially acceptable" the same as "legal" (which is the best option).

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

#124

This pitch is somewhat interesting, but, much like Sandstorm, browsing the library of pre-built apps kind of leaves me cold. It's too much like browsing a rather tiny mobile app store. There are maybe three apps that I might be interested in. Since we have AI now, I think exe.dev's pitch is better: they provide Linux VMs, a web proxy, and integrations. You can ask the AI to build whatever web app you like. I'd love t…

What apps were you looking for that you wouldn't find in the catalog?

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

#125

Making self-hosting really accessible isn't that easy, even if it's easy to setup the server machine itself. One needs to make their server machine accessible to everyone, which isn't generally possible due to how networks work, one needs a white IP address and making sure no incoming connections are rejected by the internet provider. Also one needs a domain. Obtaining it requires some bureaucratic burden, costs mone…

What's a "white IP address"? It is, sadly, more difficult than it should be, though. When everyone got online in the 90s they actually became bottom feeders and not true internet citizens. Not much has changed in 30 years. IPv6 is necessary, but the world also sucks now so people need to know what they're doing with firewalls etc. Domains are not too bad now, there are some decent registrars now like Porkbun.

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

#126

Now the key question, can the hardware be made accessible to everyone. Its definitely an improvement to make self hosting software easier but the process of setting even a raspberry pi for an average consumer interested in self hosting is still a barrier. They probably will be able to figure it out via youtube and some reddit posts but there should be an easier process or way

(author here) I am really excited to make pre-configured Raspberry Pis that people can just plug in at home, and have it work out of the box. It'll take a bit more work to make it seamless but we're definitely aiming in that direction. It's a shame how expensive Pis have gotten recently though with the memory shortage.

That is cool to hear. I know lots of folks who would be genuinely interested in this who don't have the technological chops to set up a self hosted system. One angle i have heard is degoogling and having more privacy in their data. I am really genuinely interested in this venture. I had the same idea about a year ago but was not in a place in life to act on it. I think even with the PIs being expensive because of the people will still buy them. Especially if they are seamless or near seamless.

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

#129
post #6

I think the time for this space is here. The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever. Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry.

Small business might care about the cost of subscriptions if they could get high quality systems this way.

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

#130

Making self-hosting really accessible isn't that easy, even if it's easy to setup the server machine itself. One needs to make their server machine accessible to everyone, which isn't generally possible due to how networks work, one needs a white IP address and making sure no incoming connections are rejected by the internet provider. Also one needs a domain. Obtaining it requires some bureaucratic burden, costs mone…

What's a "white IP address"? It is, sadly, more difficult than it should be, though. When everyone got online in the 90s they actually became bottom feeders and not true internet citizens. Not much has changed in 30 years. IPv6 is necessary, but the world also sucks now so people need to know what they're doing with firewalls etc. Domains are not too bad now, there are some decent registrars now like Porkbun.

"white IP address" is an address that your internet provider gives you and which is accessible from the whole internet, not just some address local for the provider's network and hidden behind NAT. Since IPv4 addresses are scarce, most providers don't allocate them directly to their customers.

An unique IPv6 may be theoretically assigned to each end device and thus solve the accessibility problem for locally-hosted servers, but I doubt internet providers do this in practice and I am afraid that many providers don't support IPv6 at all.

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