
Show HN: Cloudron – Selfhosting made Simple. Instantly run 50+ ready-to-use apps - nebulon
Hi HN!<p>This is Girish&#x2F;Johannes from Cloudron - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudron.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudron.io</a>!<p>We have been working on a platform that makes it easy to run apps on your server. It all started when Google Reader was shutdown :-). We initially started writing self-hosted equivalents of popular services but quickly found that there is a ton of great self-hosted software out there. It’s just a lot of work to actually run them and keep them up-to-date.<p>The idea with Cloudron is simple: you install the Cloudron platform on your server. You can then install apps like NextCloud, GitLab, Rocket.Chat from the App Store. Cloudron completely automates the installation. Seriously - all you have to provide is a domain to install it on and it will take care of the rest like DNS&#x2F;certs, databases, sandboxing, backups, authentication etc. The App Store provides continuous updates for the apps, so you can use them like any SaaS product (this is all no different from how mobile app stores work).<p>Most importantly, all your data is completely private&#x2F;local to the server - we don’t have access to your servers.<p>Our complete app list - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudron.io&#x2F;store&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudron.io&#x2F;store&#x2F;index.html</a>.<p>Seeing is believing. There’s a demo at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;my-demo.cloudron.me" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;my-demo.cloudron.me</a> (username&#x2F;password: cloudron).<p>Would love to get feedback!
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shuriky
I've been using Cloudron since late December 2017 and have been a very happy
customer so far. The guys behind Cloudron are doing a great job with releases,
apps, support and community. I really hope they will keep up the great service
as they grow in size (it may be challenging to be so hands on, but there are
always solutions).

My journey stared with a decision to move away from Google for most of their
services. I've looked at various platforms, services, applications that would
automate email (at least) hosting and make it as simple as possible (I'm not
really interested in learning the details of e-mail management). I've almost
settled on either of 2 well known mail specific apps when I stumbled across
Cloudron. It does have build-in support for multi domain email hosting and, in
addition, really simplifies running a lot of other systems and platforms. And
did I say it's literally just clicking a button to get an app running? Email
is a bit harder - I think I had to add few values and point my MX records
(that was the hardest bit - imagine how dead simple Cloudron makes things).

So, it's been about 9 months running Cloudron. I've got 2 domains, with emails
configured for each, few apps (WordPress, NextCloud, etc.). This really
allowed me to move away from Google for email, contacts, calendars, cloud,
etc. I am definitely a very satisfied customer and am wishing the best of luck
to the founders.

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rmdes
beeen using it since 2 years now and I'm super happy with everything, the
idea, the people behind it, the app store, the support, even trying hard I
can't find no reason to not try the cloudron approach if you are thinking on
owning your data or finding a hassle free solution to self-host clients, no
matter your perspective, cloudron allow anyone to jump in the self hosting
realm by abstracting most of the hard work of maintaining and running servers
into a smooth experience.

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Driky
Let's say you subscribe to the basic plan, install 10 apps and then
unsubscribe. As I understand it your app will continue to run, you just loose
update and management abilities linked to the Cloudron sub right ?

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nebulon
As you said, you wont get further updates to the apps, however everything will
continue to run as is. Also you will be able to further manage the server or
reconfigure already installed apps. Other features like automatic backups will
also keep working.

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sharemywin
Does any money go back to the app developers?

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gramakri
Our initial idea was to make a real App Store/marketplace where app authors
can publish apps themselves and optionally monetize. A marketplace has the
usual catch-22 issue where we need to have enough users and publishers. So as
a first step we have taken the app publish/update responsibility ourselves to
get users on the platform. Once we have enough users, we will be in a position
to work more closely with app authors.

