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by jasongi 497 days ago
The problem is that self hosted apps are rarely designed to be run serverless (why would they be?) and giving each app it’a own VPS or hosted container is going to price out the self-hosted crowd, to the point where you might as well be paying for some cloud software.

In particular, self hosted apps usually are using relational databases or SQLite which need persistent disk so can’t run serverless. They also sometimes require writing to physical disk instead of object storage like S3. Writing or rewriting apps to support serverless when they have no technical need to when self hosting would make things more complicated. Most CRUD frameworks used to write self-hosted apps do not work with NoSQL out of the box.

Thing is, almost every self hosted app supports docker now and so if you like, install portainer on a VPS or NUC or raspberry pi and you’ll be able to set up most self hosted apps easily without touching the command line.

2 comments

> and giving each app it’a own VPS or hosted container is going to price out the self-hosted crowd,

As far as I know, myself and other self-hosters run these sort of applications/services on home infrastructure or VPSes/dedicated/bare-metal where multiple applications usually share one instance. This could be done with docker, or cgroups, or countless other ways. I'm not sure if that's what you mean with a "hosted container" though, don't think I've heard about that before.

Yes. But that is not what OP comment is asking for. They want one-click. And request based pricing. I was explaining why request based pricing is infeasible and one-click install would price people out (because it would imply a VPS per service).

And I said the same thing at the end of my comment about the way people would host things using docker on a VPS or home server.

> Thing is, almost every self hosted app supports docker now and so if you like, install portainer on a VPS or NUC or raspberry pi and you’ll be able to set up most self hosted apps easily without touching the command line.

Why would you use a new VPS for each application? Just dockerize and put all your apps on one VPS, which is what most self-hosters do.
Because that’s not one-click setup or priced per request, which was the comment I was responding to was seeking.

And I did say at the end of my comment:

> Thing is, almost every self hosted app supports docker now and so if you like, install portainer on a VPS or NUC or raspberry pi and you’ll be able to set up most self hosted apps easily without touching the command line.