
Show HN: Static website hosting with auto optimization - cvrajeesh
https://www.clodui.com
======
lukevp
Your app seems geared toward users who are not very technical. I think your
pricing structure is too sophisticated. I would include everything in the free
plan and the tiers would only be bandwidth usage and form submissions. No one
is going to upgrade for robots.txt file support. Even the 30 deploys a month
is a lot but it’s psychologically going to feel limiting and decrease signups.
They’re gonna upgrade because they need to capture more forms not because of
deploy count, that’s just going to upset people. That’s why Netlify has
unlimited everything but if you want to capture forms or any other server side
processing, you pay. That’s the biggest value add for these services imo.

~~~
tln
I agree in general but FYI Netlify's free tier now limits build minutes. It
may end up being the lever that gets me to upgrade.

~~~
lukevp
That’s interesting, thanks for the update. I think removing build restrictions
still applies though. In netlify’s case they are trying to convert their large
free base whereas this product is new and needs those free signups for future
growth/conversion and I bet the build minutes aren’t going to be a huge cost.
I would just throttle heavy users (deprioritize in the queue once you exceed
100 builds in a month or something). I wouldn’t even bother doing this work
until/unless it’s a scaling or cost issue though, it may never be and saying
the builds are “unlimited*” with some wording that excessive use may be
throttled would be enough cya.

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l1am0
Like the idea! But for me I do not see the a benefit over a simple FTP enabled
webserver + cloudflare apart from the form submissions. Would you elaborate on
that, what makes it worth 5$/month?

* Pricing hint:

\- Go either more expensive with the monthly plan, or cheaper with the yearly.
For only 5% off I would not go for the yearly commitment.

\- Display your yearly price also as 4.74$ & 14.24$ per month instead of the
big yearly sum as the big number requires me as customer to pull out my
calculator to see the actual saving

\- Add Call to actions to the pricing boxes e.g. "Signup now for Business
plan", even it just redirects to the signup page, it has less friction for me
as customer

* Other website feedback:

\- I don't find a imprint. If you control my website, I would like to know who
you are.

\- I assume you are not a native english speaker (me neither), as some
sentences sound a bit weird on the site. Maybe get a proofreader. (I do that
for my projects and it increases the sites a lot :D)

\- Especially for the target group you mentioned I think the automatic
rollback is a good selling argument. As if you only use e.g. FTP and overwrite
files, everyone knows that feeling of accidentally overwritten a wrong file or
with an old version.

\- For being GDPR compliant your privacy policy is not enough

\- Unlimited Bandwidth could be a bad idea as some high traffic sites could
cost you a lot

\- A SLA would be nice to have, like "99.9% uptime" to know you are
trustworthy and my site will not be down for month

* Feature ideas:

\- Automatically add lazy loading for images

~~~
cvrajeesh
Founder here: the advantages over FTP based approach are - no need to install
extract tools and deployments are atomic, so you can rollback instantaneously.

Settings up Cloudflare or AWS CloudFront + S3 is easy for users who all
familiar with technologies. What I have seen is, there are many web designers
out there who design awesome websites but lacks technical knowledge. My
brother was like that, he designs websites but I was the one who was helping
him to host and write PHP scripts for handling form submissions etc... that's
one reason I built a service like this.

Thank you for the suggestion on pricing, I'll consider it and update it
accordingly.

 _Update:_

Image lazy loading enabled when website optimization settings is set to "Full"

~~~
monkin
> Thank you for the suggestion on pricing, I'll consider it and update it
> accordingly.

You should calculate everything and move your prices up as you have unlimited
bandwidth. I have few static websites, but smallest one generates on avg.
400gb monthly transfer(plain website with main content), adding to this image
optimisation(sizes, etc) and few other options totalling nearly 1TB+ a month.

So for me $15 looks nice, but you would loose a huge amount of money on
clients like me. You can't expect that static website will weight 1MB and eat
1GB of bandwidth a month. :)

This is why Cloudflare has image optimisation in Business plan, or Imgix which
is pricey. :)

~~~
cvrajeesh
Thank you, that's a good point. I'll change unlimited bandwidth in the
business plan to limited.

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geocrasher
I like what you're doing but I have to admit that I am finding a lot of the
front page copy to be somewhat awkward:

"Clodui automatically minifies all your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, then
served in compressed gzip format to further reduce the file size. All the
requests served over HTTP/2, which further boosts your website speed."

would be much easier to read if it were reworded like so:

"Clodui automatically minifies all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. These
minified files are then compressed and served over HTTP/2, which further
boosts your websites speed."

If you want help cleaning up more of it, contact me at my username @ gmail.

~~~
monkin
IMO all copy should be thrown away as it's aimed for non-technical users. So
cut this technical buzzwords and write like for kids. ;)

~~~
lukevp
Agreed. Something like: “using our Accelerator technology, we take care of
optimizing your website with industry-best practices. Your users get fast page
speeds, and you can stop worrying and get back to building sites.” Then have a
graph of page load times without acceleration and with acceleration and a link
for more info for the curious.

~~~
Filligree
A buzzword bingo like that would instantly turn me off, but perhaps that
doesn't matter. I admit I'm not in the target market.

~~~
StavrosK
To be fair, it wasn't that buzzwordy, it's just the "Accelerator technology"
thing that biased me. The rest of the sentence was fine, maybe that's what
happened for you too.

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cl0rkster
Worth noting that firebase (Google) provides a similar service. It's entirely
free to host static websites. Definitely ends up on a cdn and definitely uses
static compression. Ssl certs even get auto handled.

~~~
arkj
True, but I really like the simple click to deploy feature. I can see it will
add value to designers who find simple deployments hard.

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SneezyRobot
Hi Cvrajeesh, congrats on launching! It's a big achievement to get your
project out the door and in customer's hands.

We launched a very similar service (fast.io) a few months ago and have found
some good interest in the product. Unfortunately, however, there are many
other good solutions for simple deployments and performant static hosting. My
question for you would be, what are you doing that solves your customer's
problem so much better than competitors that they'd be willing to put their
mission-critical website on your (unproven) service over anyone else's?

For these simple use-cases (the ones you appear to be targeting) most users
just aren't willing to pay. The more sophisticated users who are running
businesses (and would pay) often need more features and greater control over
their hosting solution - features that will take you a long time to build out
and prove in the market.

As such, we're working on a product pivot that's educated by the insights
we've gained through our initial launch. We don't want to go head-on with
other products that are, quite frankly, doing a great job in this market
already. I'll be really curious to see/hear if you encounter similar
challenges and how you navigate them.

~~~
ruttle
> We launched a very similar service

I haven't seen them post to a Show HN to shamelessly promote and link to their
own rival version, so that's one difference.

~~~
SneezyRobot
I can see how you might think that, but to be more clear we are moving out of
this market - I'm trying to be helpful to the OP (and anyone else who's
looking at this market) by sharing our experience.

A Google search is going to yield a lot of great other companies for static
hosting like [https://netlify.com](https://netlify.com) (which even supports
this exact functionality of drag and drop uploads) and
[https://zeit.co](https://zeit.co) just to name a couple, not to mention a
graveyard of other services who've tried to do similar things over the last 5
years. You might even notice that we've changed our messaging to focus on
file-sharing and direct links - not website hosting.

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tiborsaas
A few nitpicks:

\- In the ToS there's no mention of the company I'm making the agreement with

\- I'd appreciate an about page about who's behind this, but my first point
kinda explains it :)

\- What CDN are you using? Have you built your own?

~~~
cvrajeesh
Thank you, we're using AWS Cloudfront as the CDN.

ToS needs to be re-written; currently, I used an online service to generate it
:(

~~~
yoran
Just a small thing: Cloudfront gets very expensive rather quickly. We went to
a $4,000 pm to a $20 pm bill by moving our CDN for static assets from
Cloudfront to Cloudflare. The only reason we let it come that far is that we
had AWS credits. But as soon as we neared the end of the credits, we made the
switch to Cloudflare.

~~~
cvrajeesh
Thank you for the heads-up

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wenc
Just curious: how is "clodui" pronounced?

At first I read Cloud UI, but after pausing a little I realized it was not
Cloud UI.

I mention this because I think names matter for word-of-mouth recommendation.
In many interviews, Morgan Freeman would recount that The Shawshank Redemption
bombed at the box-office because back in the day word-of-mouth was still
dominant way of getting movie recommendations, and people couldn't say or
remember the word "Shawshank".

~~~
cvrajeesh
Founder here: I'm pronouncing it as "clod ui". The name came from the word
"Cloud" \+ "UI" and removed "u" from Cloud so the domain is available.

~~~
StavrosK
"Clod" as in "stupid person"? Was that intentional?

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vorpalhex
Woof, expensive. This might be worth it if there's live support included and a
really easy control panel, but otherwise a similar setup is $60/year.

The image resizing and optimization is a good sell, but it's dramatically more
expensive to have it when under the hood it's a relatively cheap feature aside
from initial build out, and it's available in basic form for free on places
like Netlify.

------
chrisked
Wanted to read about forms in your docs. Page does not exist :
[https://www.clodui.com/form/add-form](https://www.clodui.com/form/add-form)

~~~
cvrajeesh
this is the correct URL [https://www.clodui.com/docs/form/add-
form](https://www.clodui.com/docs/form/add-form)

------
fs2
Looks interesting, the minification looks like a pretty good selling point.

One thing I noticed is the slow connection from Australia, it seems your CDN
is limited to Europe and America.

~~~
cvrajeesh
Thank you, I'll check that

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ge0
Would be nice to know more about the CDN, because after all just two POPs
makes a very simple CDN, but a CDN isn't just two POPs!

~~~
cvrajeesh
Founder here: my entire stack is on AWS. I'm using CloudFront as the CDN

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tsukurimashou
aren't a lot of these things already handled by web servers and browsers?
(caching. gzip compression, etc...)

~~~
cvrajeesh
Founder here,

yes caching and gzip is done by web servers. Clodui does much more than that

* minification of CSS, JS and HTML

* automatic webp image generation, dynamic image resize

* and the website is served via CDN, which connects to the nearest CDN server

* automatic form handling etc...

We're really targeting users with less technical knowledge in server-side but
creates awesome websites.

~~~
vegardx
Does it really make sense to "minify" everything when you have gzip enabled?

~~~
cvrajeesh
minify saves a few bytes per file but image optimization feature reduces your
website size considerably. Usually, people rely on image CDNs to do this, we
provide it with hosting service itself.

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jiy2020
Wow !! This is a great piece of work. Hassle-free hosting and automatic
optimization

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tuananh
that's just cloudflare. they are doing all of those.

~~~
cvrajeesh
I guess they don't handle form submissions automatically, need to write code
to handle it.

~~~
tuananh
they have cloudflare workers for that.

~~~
cvrajeesh
I'm not targeting users with that level of technical experience or those who
want to spend the time and effort to do all those.

~~~
tuananh
make sense. but i feel the difference are not big enough. cloudflare dns
change do most of this, with the exception of form submission.

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_raj9
Really cool idea ! :)

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ilovenetlify
Looks like Netlify

~~~
cvrajeesh
Founder here: I do like Netlify, IMHO it's targeting developer community, I'm
targeting users who all are still developing websites in the traditional way.

