
Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting - baconomatic
https://cloudbit.io/
======
CameronBanga
I've been using Hostifi for a year+ I think now. If anyone is looking for a
similar service, I highly recommend:
[https://hostifi.net](https://hostifi.net)

Pricing is better IMO if you have any serious number of devices. The founder
has created as an open startup ([https://rchase.com](https://rchase.com)) and
has been making good profit, so less concern of it going under too. No offense
to OP on that, but switching to something like this can be a bunch of time
personally, so want a clear path for startup.

Finally, and this is an personal story I know. But the support on Hostifi is
fantastic. They have a knowledge base and their team is more than happy to
help when issues come up. Which is great because I love the software, but am
not a personal expert.

~~~
zomg
+1 for hostifi. i've been using them for my home AP's for a couple years now.
i sent tech support a couple questions and reilly himself emailed me back.
great guy and he was very, very helpful.

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joecot
Question, since a number of folks have chimed in about using various cloud
hosted controllers: how do you initially setup the network (given that you
presumably need the router to have internet access to connect to the cloud
controller), and how do you handle it if there's an internet connectivity
problem? My office currently has an internal network VM that runs the
controller, and we might move to a Cloud Key, but I'm curious how folks handle
having a cloud controller for their Unifi router when their Unifi router might
lose internet. Or are most folks using the controllers to manage Ubiquiti wifi
hotspots without using the USG as their main router?

We're a small shop of around 20 desktops or so, 2 switches, and 1 router, with
a couple external static IPs. I can see the benefit for trying to orchestrate
multiple sites using a cloud controller, but I'd be worried about doing it for
a single site given internet issues, unless there's something I'm missing.

~~~
reillychase
Hi Joe! At [https://hostifi.net](https://hostifi.net) we have tons of people
using the USGs and connecting them to the cloud server. The USG actually is
the only UniFi device that has a web gui and it has configuration options for
setting up the WAN before you adopt it specifically to solve that problem -
how to get internet up so you can adopt to a cloud server.

If you have a couple static IPs at one site though, keep in mind that the USG
can only do one static IP (without having to dive into CLI), so for any more
advanced network like that most people are using a different router vendor but
sticking with the UAPs and UniFi switches for the rest of the network.

We also have lots of people using both the built-in hotspot portal pages as
well as external portals just fine.

As others have mentioned, if the controller goes down, the networks do not go
down. All of the device settings are stored locally and don't depend on the
controller, the only exception being that the hotspot pages do require the
controller to be online in order to work.

~~~
joecot
> If you have a couple static IPs at one site though, keep in mind that the
> USG can only do one static IP (without having to dive into CLI)

It is doable though. I have a JSON file of the extra configuration needed to
setup the additional WAN IPs and the needed port forwarding. Someone even made
a codepen tool to make that configuration[1]. Is that custom configuration not
possible with hostifi?

> As others have mentioned, if the controller goes down, the networks do not
> go down. All of the device settings are stored locally and don't depend on
> the controller, the only exception being that the hotspot pages do require
> the controller to be online in order to work.

So while I'm aware the network does not require the controller to be online in
order for the devices to work, the problem is that, if there's an internet
problem, one of the first places I look to see what the issue is is ... the
controller. So with an external controller, if there isn't some extra step I'm
missing to deal with internet outages, I'm essentially stuck if I'm trying to
figure out what the problem is and change the configuration.

1\. [https://community.ui.com/questions/Tool-Map-Multiple-WAN-
IP-...](https://community.ui.com/questions/Tool-Map-Multiple-WAN-IP-to-Local-
IPs-on-USG/b7daf87d-84aa-4557-8ad8-2ff516252f91)

~~~
reillychase
> config.gateway.json Yes you can do it in the json file, and that works on
> [https://hostifi.net](https://hostifi.net)

> Internet down There's not really anything you would need to change on the
> controller to fix a WAN issue that you couldn't fix by changing the WAN
> settings on the USG's web interface... Never had a problem so far with it
> anyway, with 25,000+ UniFi devices that people have connected to HostiFi.
> Also, one benefit of a WAN down situation with the cloud controller is you
> get a notification email about it. On a local controller you won't get a WAN
> down notification email because... well, it can't send it.

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jimnotgym
I have a cloud key on each site, and use the unifi cloud controller. No VPNs,
no problems. Actually surprised anyone does anything else!

------
dsl
How is this different from or any better than Ubiquiti's Cloud Controller
hosting?

Also based on your pricing it is cheaper to buy a Cloud Key if you plan to use
your devices longer than 10 months.

~~~
scohesc
Instead of having to configure potentially tens of different site-to-site VPN
connections to connect every site to your head office where you controller is
located, you're hosting it on the internet which makes implementation easier.

I would never ever trust a Ubiquiti product being open on the internet though
- especially their software products. Too many issues with their firmware on
their "carrier"-classed radios, as well as buggy integration with UNMS makes
me a bit wary.

~~~
Xylakant
> Instead of having to configure potentially tens of different site-to-site
> VPN connections to connect every site to your head office where you
> controller is located, you're hosting it on the internet which makes
> implementation easier.

Unifi offers a cloud controller as hosted service, see
[https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360006288413](https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360006288413).

------
xoa
L3 hosting and UniFi is now unfortunately just one of the many, many areas
where it feels like Ubiquiti just kind of quit on it many years ago. It's
really unfortunate but I've really gotten that sinking feeling about the
platform for the last year or two now, with their killing of the forums and no
replacement/upgrade for the bug/feature tracking part being the final straw.
But overall they seem to show a lot of the classic signs of basic internal
dysfunction, tons of effort expended on surface gloss and re-skinning things
over and over again (yet then failing to even quickly bring feature parity
up), lots of basic features and even merely keeping internal components up to
date disregarded, ever increasing technical debt in the hardware line due to
failure to update and replace now ancient kit (which instead they still sell
new at full price). Something is going to _have_ to give at some point.
Unfortunately I don't see anything else in the same position either. It's such
a depressing waste of potential.

~~~
paulgerhardt
I finally switched to UniFi equipment after hearing for years how much better
it is than consumer WiFi equipment.

Oh man, what a headache.

Depending how one configured things, there’s at least 3 ways to provision
devices - all 3 incompatible and will cause issues with each other. User
manuals refer to Apps no longer in existence. In no instance have I had a
“just works” experience. In two instances the option I needed to configure was
not available through any of the 3 (4?) dashboards and I had to resort to
sshing into the device.

4 weeks later I’m still experiencing ISP fiber modem disconnect issues every
48 hours and can not connect remotely to debug. The impression I get is 90% of
the performance “gains” one gets from switching from Asus to Ubiquiti come
from dedicating one $300 piece of hardware (which overheats) for each network
function (firewall, switch, router, AP) rather than using a single threaded
all-in-one device. Then people still bolt on accessory devices like pi-holes
when a USG should be perfectly capable of performing the task.

~~~
mkhpalm
They have a UDM and UDM-Pro in early acces that handles the all-in-one device
scenario you mentioned.

~~~
shankspeaks
I'm not sure if this all-in-one game is going to work. IMO, Unifi's hardware
apart from their Wireless offerings is limited compared to other players in a
similar price range. They should stick to what they're best at, which for me
is their Wireless range and build around that.

In our case, we ended up using Mikrotik devices for our physical layers and
Unifi as our APs. So far, the performance of the Wifi devices is excellent
(though tuning high density configs was a bit of a pain), and the Mikrotiks
give us exceptional control over the behaviour of the network topology.

Playing to the strengths of each vendor was the way to go for us. Worked out
way cheaper as well.

------
zamalek
Nobody who has 5 devices will pay $10/mo for this; they are all doing what I
am: booting the controller on-demand (or some other local solution). Less than
$10pa would seem appropriate (and I'd snap that up in a heartbeat).

~~~
reillychase
At [https://hostifi.net](https://hostifi.net) we are working on 2 new plans
launching soon, a 5 device $3.99/month or $39/year plan and a 3 site, 15
device plan at $9.99/month or $99/year. Trying to find the price point for
those small install/home users is tricky. Our primary customers are the IT/MSP
business owners who manage all of their customer networks from one server.

------
mister_hn
Hi, would you make this also as a downloadable and on-premise version to run
on my own homelab? That would be cool!

~~~
shankspeaks
I doubt it would make sense for them to do it. Most of the heavy lifting is
from the controller which you could run anyway on prem and for FREE.

The cloud deployment AFAIK would allow for better multi-tenant management, and
SaaSifying the management experience.

From personal experience, running the controller on a Pi in your home network
is good enough for most scenarios. Plus if you want to customize, you can poke
around the APIs and wire up what you want. It's pretty powerful once you get
the hang of it, and there are some fabulous libraries available thanks to
community contributions on Github.

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kryogen1c
This seems like a weird product, considering its just a single-use VPS. If
you're using a DC with NPS (or not, just plain ol PSK) in the sky, your
ubiquiti controller just goes on there anyway.

Some clients just allow access via site-to-site vpns. Seems like a better
solution than paying for a VPS to host free software

~~~
Piskvorrr
Fair point..."free" often means "without regard for time" however. Even though
I don't have a use for this one, I pay for various services which I could
do/run myself, because I only have 24 hours a day.

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gmu3
I've been running my controller on a raspberry pi for a few years without any
issues

~~~
ilikepi
I'd like to move mine to a Pi, but I'm a little concerned about storage. Do
you store the controller database on the internal SD card or do you have it on
a more robust external/network storage device?

~~~
GreenJelloShot
Store everything on the SD card but make sure to create a backup image, just
in case.

------
davidu
This is a great passive income type of business.

Here's a nearly identical version that a number of folks use:
[https://hostifi.net/](https://hostifi.net/)

~~~
reillychase
Thanks for the mention! It's certainly not passive though (like I thought it
was going to be when I started it lol), I'm working on it 40+ hours/week and
just hired our first support engineer, Safwan. He used to work for Ubiquiti
support for 2 years before he joined this month. We've got over 25,000
Ubiquiti devices connected across ~600 servers. The daily work involves
helping people with support questions, demos, migrations, testing UniFi
updates, rolling them out to the servers, setting up SSL certs, and developing
new features. We're working on a new website currently as well.

~~~
mantoto
Cool. Nice little business you build there :)

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bhouston
ubiquity are totally going to find a way to block this.

~~~
shankspeaks
If they did, they'll have to stop offering the controller for free, but that
would really hurty their SMB/Enterprise adoption.

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abdalmatin16
Look good

