[dublinben]

This just looks like expensive managed hosting. It's still just cloud hosting on someone else's hardware.

For truly personal 'cloud' apps, I recommend projects like Freedombox or Sandstorm. They make it this easy to deploy cloud apps on hardware you actually physically own and control.

[wmf]

IMO people who aren't political dissidents are generally better served by renting reliable resources in a datacenter with good bandwidth than running flaky hardware in their home off their broadband. Fortunately the sticker shock of a $200 box vs. $10/month will mostly take care of this issue.

[peterwwillis]

I think this is much easier for the average consumer. Reminds me of the old "virtual hosting" platforms that made it easy enough for your grandma to set up & maintain a website. I like it.

[ocdtrekkie]

People are quick to condemn GeoCities, but it was a pretty fantastic thing for the world, when you get right down to it. I'm excited to see lots of providers looking at doing similar things for the modern web.

[portalplatform]

We're trying to make it as close to self-managed as a sysadmin running their own machine in a colo. We're not there yet but that's where we're headed. Sandstorm is working on a hosting service as well.

The only way you can truly control a server, as an individual, is by running it out of your home. The problem with servers at home is that most residential internet is terrible for running servers on.

[angrybits]

You can have locked cage space leased from a datacenter if you want to be in control of all the things you have any business being in control of.

[ocdtrekkie]

That, however, is prohibitively expensive for small scale users though. Even moreso than running a box from home.

[routelastresort]

I did a quick comparison with DigitalOcean, and it looks like equal (obviously, with more features). What's cheaper cloud hosting than DO (that's not crap)?

[grubles]

Vultr:

https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

[portalplatform]

The big difference is that with Portal you can run 8 x 128 MB (or 4 x 256 MB) VMs within a single 1 GB memory plan. Running each of your apps in a separate VM on a standard VPS would cost a lot more.

[wmf]

This sounds like a case for containers, does it not?

[portalplatform]

Yes, we initially used containers. We think VMs are a more secure form of isolation, which is arguable. We also want users to have the ability to run apps based on a variety of operating systems and kernels.

Portal apps themselves can use containers of course. For example, a game server app might run each game process in a separate container within its own VM.