Isn't this very similar to uber/lyft which undercut "professional" drivers? Or airbnb undercutting professional hotel services? I thought we let free market decide who wins and so if people are willing to do for free by their free will, why shouldn't they?
Do you think it's sad if a couple has shared values and enjoys living those values together?. My partner and I are both very frugal, hoping to be able to retire early. We constantly celebrate how frugally we're able to live because we're together. Everything is half-off: housing, cars, groceries, travel, electronics. We each research different ways to save on bills, support each other to cut down on costs, research different aspects of saving and investing. You may not value frugality, but the cost savings of being in a relationship is undeniable and great for people who do value it.
Yeah, in HN there is a lot of anti-google (even anti-apple) sentiment but at they same time I get the feeling most users don't change their behavior just because of that. Everyone loves their iphones and macs and google home, I get it... I used to mistake techies to be trend setters. I understand now that they are completely different types of people. techies are more like consumers, whereas trend setters are more like people pushing limits and changing their life(style) for the fun of it. I have commented before here but I would imagine self-hosting is really not a big deal. These days we have amazing options like cloudron, yunohost, sandstorm etc that help people install apps and manage their servers but I don't see many comments from people actually doing it.
For those into self-hosting, there's some really up and coming options these days - Cloudron, Yunohost, homelabos. Sandstorm also seems some activity again these days (come on guys!). Honestly, it really is not that hard to degoogle these days especially if you are a techie.
A while back I installed ServerPilot which automatically sets up Nginx/Apache/PHP/MySQL for you. It also handles security updates. This made those $5 VPS' so much more appealing [1] as I could install lots of small Node.js apps on a single server, and avoid managed hosting providers who seem to prefer charging per app instance.
Anyway ServerPilot then scrapped their free plan so I've been looking for an alternative. cloudron looks cool, I don't see anything specific to Node.js/Express, but it does have a LAMP stack which includes Apache, so I might try that. Otherwise I'll probably use something like CapRover [2], a self-hosted platform as a service.
Would love to get your opinion as I'm building a competing product to ServerPilot in this space. Is the $5 too expensive for the service? or is it just too expensive because the billing increases as you have more servers under management, and they charge you per app as well?
Are there features ServerPilot is missing that would justify the price more for you? Some examples might be monitoring, analytics, automated security patching, containerization of workloads, etc.
Would the plan be more appealing if the cost of the plan, the portal, and the VM hosting itself were all rolled into one? (i.e. you would just pay one company, rather than having to sign up for DO as well as ServerPilot).
1) Independence of hosting provider is a must. Don't want to be forced to use your VPS service when I have all my infrastructure already on Linode, DO, Vultr, etc.
2) Should be free when used in non-commercial applications. Multiple servers included.
3) Keep the common and already available typical configurations free: lamp, lemp, python, letsencrypt, email. Charge for things which no other panel free or otherwise typically supports. lightspeed, go, caddy, load balancing, sql replication, graphql, etc. Thats value.
"Self-hosting apps is time consuming and error-prone. Keeping your system up-to-date and secure is a full-time job. Cloudron lets you focus on using the apps and not worry about system administration."
neat, don't think I've seen something like this before!
- user picks a cloud (or have a "Advanced" option on the next step instead)
- you show them OpenID/OAuth form for their cloud provider
- guide them through the creation of an account if necessary
- you get the token, that permits your server to create cloud resources on behalf of the user
- you go ahead and create their services for them
- potentially store the token to be able to update the apps automatically
I thought about that, when I was considering to make a similar service (also similar to sandstorm.io). Glad to see somebody doing something in that area (I guess without the permissions model yet).
Problem is: most clouds don't let you easily create an account, so "guide them through the creation of an account" might be impossible without leaving the browser.
I have been a Cloudron user for a bit of time.
Recently I have launched a company and we're now a paying and very happy customer of Cloudron's business subscription.
It seems that the "next app suggestion" process have stalled.
To me as an outsider of your internal process, I cannot see what applications are being preferred over others. There are tons of very good suggestions which are not receiving traction it seems, from the app suggestion-forum.
A few examples which Cloudron needs, and would benefit from having attracting more users:
When I checked mattermost a year ago, the mattermost opensource edition had no basic permissions/access control. Any user could archive any channel. I have seen many teams fall into this "trap" only to find this basic restriction later. We since moved to Rocket.Chat. Is this still the case?
Keybase is.. not ready for prime time. It's pretty janky, channel discovery is a pain as is spam, and it's still got that weird crypto half-baked nonsense.
Access control is intentionally missing from the open source "team" version:
> Team Edition is "virtual office" where a team works together as trusted colleagues. It means people can walk anywhere they want, and move the furniture if they choose.
> I need to ask this ticket be closed since it's not a bug
> You're of course more than welcome to fork as well.
But would Mattermost accept a PR that cuts into the differentiation on "advanced access control" of their enterprise product? https://mattermost.com/pricing/
Open source is only as powerful as the community's willingness to maintain a fork.
yeah, exactly this. you don't need to force boredom on kids. simply set an example. the kids are merely a reflection of what the parents are doing. like how many parents "force" themselves to be alone and be creative for a couple of hours everyday? most of my fellow friends are just binge watching or playing video games in their free time. kids are following their footsteps.
Unless we as a society return to a simpler lifestyle of living, I see this as an unsolvable problem. For example, everyone in the US is trumpeting climate change and what not. And yet just walk into any starbucks and any supermarket and restaurant - none of that stuff is really recyclable. People generate tons of trash by using home delivery packages via amazon and non-recyclable food containers. Cars everywhere and completely unmaintained public transport. People really aren't willing to make a change but will go on about paris agreement and hate on trump. Their actions and life style say otherwise. What is then wrong with people in other countries wanting a similar life style?
What no one wants to admit is that our modern way of life is totally unsustainable on any level. Plastic straw bans and the like help us feel like where at least trying, but it's all just band-aids on a gaping wound. Then corporations try and shift the blame to the consumer at the same time making us us dependent on their products as soon as we're born.
If you divide world GDP by number of households in world, the household income turns out to be $59,000. In theory, we have achieved enough progress that everyone on the planet can live fairly rich lives. This is obviously not the case due to massive inequality. But the interesting side effect of this is the age of abundance for few of us. I just drank a bottle of blueberry yogurt and threw away plastic bottle. I get free soda from office and toss aluminium cane to the trace. It just occurs to me how insignificant the existence of that plastic bottle or aluminium cane is for me. It literally existed only for the purpose of providing little liquid and then to disappear forever in that growing pile of trash on the planet. It's amazing to think about how many things in our households we wouldn't consider valuable but would be treasured in some other part of the world. My theory is that this age of abundance is short and possibly in 100 years of time when trash engulfs this planet, mines dries up, raw materials becomes rare material - the future generation would look to us as some sort of envy and anger.
>Unless we as a society return to a simpler lifestyle of living, I see this as an unsolvable problem.
There's no reason to presume that it isn't possible to retain our current standard of living while also solving the problem through technological innovation - we've arguably had the solution for decades in the form of nuclear, and we're inching closer every day with developments in non-nuclear renewables and outside of the energy space with innovation in farming (outdoor and indoor/vertical, GMO) and material design.
Despite the doom and gloom, talk along the lines of 12 years before irreversible runaway into catastrophe is really a worst case estimate. Chances are we will have plenty of time to develop technology to slow climate change and adapt to its effects in the coming decades, particularly given that it is a rising concern among citizens the world over.
Honestly, given how much of our infrastructure is dependent on fossil fuels and environmentally unfriendly materials, it simply isn't practical to make the kind of radical transition you're advocating for - our entire food chain, for example relies on modern plastics and ICEs for delivery/storage. The waste you describe from e.g. Starbucks and packaging is probably a small percentage of the waste that our modern civilization is structured upon, even if you convinced everyone to drastically lower their standard of living overnight. Balancing risk with cost, this is a transition that cannot happen overnight anyway.
> it simply isn't practical to make the kind of radical transition you're advocating for
The above line is exactly my point. We think changing ourselves is impractical. But we want the rest of the world to abide by our views of "green" and "sustainable living".
