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

Post by iFreilicht » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 4:28 PM UTC

apitman wrote: post #318

mawise wrote: post #267

This isn't the hard part of self-hosting, at least not anymore. In the comments here there are lots of examples of similar projects that solve basically the same problem (app selection and deployment). To make self-hosting "easy" we need to solve domain registration, DNS management, and port-forwarding configuration. This probably requires a project more like OpenWRT that includes an API-driven relationship with a re…

Makes me a little sad that it's been almost exactly 6 years since I made this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24475946 In that time I started a domain registrar, a free OpenID Connect login service ( https://lastlogin.net/ ), created the de facto list of tunneling tools ( https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling ), and built a couple of my own tunneling tools (SirTunnel and boringproxy), all to…

I wholeheartedly agree with your comment and have thought a lot about how I would solve these problems. Considered founding a startup as well, but the market size is very unclear. I would say in theory, cloud-in-a-bottle already comes quite far. The only thing missing is another tier where imbue only provides you with a domain and a reverse-proxy so your home-server is reachable. Of course, their software would then also habe to manage the whole certificate lifecycle and DNS-challenge, but if it did, then you can have your server at home and not have to worry about how it manages to be reachable from the internet.

However, if I'm understanding you correctly, a solution like this would also be too much vendor lock-in for you, correct? If so, how independent do you wanna go? I think especially if you want people to be able to self-host from home, you will always need some proxy in the cloud. Or are you considering a DDNS setup?

Post by abustamam » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

jiaosdjf wrote: post #332

abustamam wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah pretty much this. I tend to use Astro but I think your point still stands. I wanted to make a basic online agenda in a few different formats for a Toastmasters club and though I could have used raw html and css to build it, but each agenda had slightly different layout that would have been a lot of copy pasting in html and lots of room for error. With astro and react islands it was fairly simple to implement.

I had a similar problem and used 11ty to build static html from templates and markdown files. Works great and keeps you close to the metal

That sounds nifty, I'll check it out!

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

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