

Show HN: Deploy your websites from Dropbox - minhajuddin
http://www.websrvr.in/?hn1

======
bobfunk
Founder of BitBalloon
([https://www.bitballoon.com](https://www.bitballoon.com)) here.

Always interesting to see more and more startups popping up in the static
hosting space. Since we launched a year ago there's been at least 6 other
entering the space.

Right now it looks like your main selling point is price.

Think carefully about whether that's the way you want to go. The real
competitors here is the humongous shared hosting market, and the big players
there have much deeper pockets and far better economies of scale than any
startup.

With a $1/site price you'll pretty much never have a chance to make paid
advertising a viable customer acquisition channel and as someone else
mentioned, think about what the price of giving any kind of support will be.
The lower end of the market will (in my experience) also be the place where
people will need the most help with stuff like DNS setup, or basic issues such
as not having an index.html file, etc, etc.

Good luck!

~~~
minhajuddin
Thanks, nice to see you here and thanks for the feedback :)

------
apple314159
Not sure what value proposition is here. Static content is well understood.
I'm using google storage and it does the job pretty well.

~~~
minhajuddin
It is not to store content but the ability to create new sites just by
creating a new folder, e.g. if you create a new folder in
'Dropbox/Apps/websrvr' called 'apple314159' you would have a new website
created and online at
'[http://apple314159.websrvr.in/'](http://apple314159.websrvr.in/') and you
could manage your website through your local computer.

~~~
sethrin
Dropbox doesn't play well with git, or perhaps version control in general.
Having a live site which is unversioned is somewhat less than desirable. I am
sure there is some category of people for whom this is useful, but I am a
professional, which means I have been burned too many times to consider not
using version control. Hence, this service is entirely useless to me.

Hiding complexity from the user is mostly good; it's a shame that the
replication service isn't more capable.

~~~
smt88
I keep about a dozen personal, non-critical projects in Dropbox. All are
versioned with git, and it works great. Dropbox itself is versioned (since I'm
a paying subscriber), so I have two layers of security there.

What negative experiences have you had with Dropbox + VCS?

~~~
eli
Maybe it's better now, but I've had problems with .git folders in dropbox.
Dropbox doesn't understand the directory structure and conflicts are handled
by merging competing .git folders and renaming internal files as needed --
almost certainly not what you want.

~~~
smt88
I can't speak for before I started using Dropbox with git, but for the past 3
years, conflicts are handled well (and not as you describe).

First of all, Dropbox will not overwrite data. If it finds a conflict, it will
save a second file with "[machine name]'s Conflicted Copy" and the
modification date at the end.

This hasn't happened to me with any git files yet, however, because my
machines are always online. That means my working tree is always the same
across devices and my .git folder is always identical.

The only way a conflict would be created is if I committed while working
offline and then committed on another machine while working offline.

If that happens, I could just grep my Dropbox folder for files with
"conflicted" in the name and remove them. Or, because I committed my files to
a remote (often Github, but sometimes others), I could just delete the local
copy and clone.

~~~
eli
Sure, I'm not suggesting there would be permanent data loss... but doesn't
Dropbox renaming a bunch of files deep within .git folder result in an
unusable repository that you'd have to fix by hand or restore from backup?

~~~
smt88
This whole discussion made me curious, so I tested it. Dropbox doesn't
_rename_ files. It _creates new files_. All you have to do is delete the new
files (which are really "forks" of your current data) and you have your
working tree synced with your data store again. It's really easy.

------
mariocesar
Just do it your self,
[https://gist.github.com/mariocesar/3f3e63cd422e1024d7e5](https://gist.github.com/mariocesar/3f3e63cd422e1024d7e5)
(If anyone has enhancements please fork or comment)

Time before when Canonical announce Ubuntu One was going to be discontinued I
comment how I depend on U1 to deploy my static websites, like 30 static
websites some of them with simple .php scripts that manage contact forms or
feed aggregation, it's pretty easy to do and still don't get why so much
people put so much effort on making it a SaaS, we are talking about a little
sysadmin work.

I have no option that use Dropbox as a backend as most of my clients use it,
but it's pretty obvious you can setup the same features with other services.

~~~
minhajuddin
With a SaaS solution you don't have to worry about uptime and having your own
server. It's definitely not for every one :)

~~~
mariocesar
Uptime for an instance that will only serve static content? do we are not just
delegating to much? We are talking about a Nginx configuration and a little of
sysadmin work.

------
JacobIrwin
Free is cool too! [http://www.dropboxwiki.com/tips-and-tricks/host-websites-
wit...](http://www.dropboxwiki.com/tips-and-tricks/host-websites-with-dropbox)

------
1986v
Congratulations on your development. It seems this has been done before, and
albeit it is neat what is the benefit over a low-cost "standard" webhost? I
can name a few webhosts that are in the $3-5 range and offer standard tools
and the ability to install a SSL.

~~~
minhajuddin
The benefit is that you don't have to connect to your webhost over FTP and
change files, instead you could just open your file from your dropbox edit it
and be done with it. And to create a website all you need to do is create a
folder and put your html into it.

Thanks for the feedback :)

I would love to hear about features which might make you consider this
service.

------
bikamonki
I build static sites/apps that use saas tools for the dynamic content. For
example, a post's comments are stored on parse.com However, this architecture
chokes on IE8/7 unless CORS is handled through SSL. How would I install SSL in
your service?

~~~
minhajuddin
I have SSL support planned in the near future (1-3 months) if people ask for
it. It would require you to upload the private/public keys to websrvr. Thanks
for the question :) I was really planning for SSL support because of google's
announcement to bump SSL sites in their listings, I wasn't aware of the CORS
issues with IE.

------
amitamb
Minor issue but "Edit your files locally to updated the site." should be "Edit
your files locally to update the site."

One positive point is I got basic idea on what the site is and how to use it
in minutes.

~~~
minhajuddin
Thanks, fixed it.

------
reubano
So, is this like using GitHub Pages without having to do a `git push`?

~~~
minhajuddin
Yes, a little bit like that. However, this is part of our core business so I
think that gives us a bit of an advantage. For instance, just today we
released the ability to minify css/html/js and also gzip it to the highest
compression so that websites hosted on websrvr perform better. For
www.websrvr.in's homepage I see a decrease in size from 8799 to 2649 bytes
which is a decrease in size by 70%.

~~~
reubano
Gotcha. I use precompilers which take care of file concatenation and
minification, but I never could get gzipping to work. Are you targeting devs
that probably use github already or not tech folk?

~~~
minhajuddin
Yeah, I am targeting devs and designers, I used to publish my blog posts using
jekyll and git on my own server, and it _is_ a bit tedious to push on every
typo correction :)

------
minhajuddin
Founder here, would love to get feedback

~~~
sandyshankar
Some time back, I was in the market for similar sevices, I evaluated brace.io
and site44. If I am not wrong, they both charge $5/month for 5 websites. As a
user, I would not mind paying that, because if I want to quickly demo to a
client, I would prefer a separate sub-domain/folder without having to pull my
credit card for that. Second, I was looking for minification and compression,
great to see that you have added that feature. Third, great to see that you
have contact forms, the first obstacle where you might think of servers. I
like brace.io's implementation. Additionally I liked brace.io's admin and
shipping workflow. Do you have anything similar?

~~~
minhajuddin
You don't really have to enter your payment information every time you create
a website. Once you signup, you can make a deposit for $3 and we'll charge you
only when you create a folder in your dropbox (that too 1 hour after you
create the folder in case it was done by a mistake). Also, even if you don't
have any funds in your account your websites will be live, we'll send you an
email to clear your invoices :) In short, all you have to do to create a
website is create a folder with an index.html file. I am also the creator of
[http://getsimpleform.com](http://getsimpleform.com) which is a service which
allows simple contact forms with akismet integration for spam prevention, it
also allows you to use templates for the email notifications on form
submissions. websrvr will have all that functionality and a bit more :)

------
JoshTheGeek
How do you deal with naming conflicts?

~~~
minhajuddin
Great question :) If the folder name 'foobar' is taken, the app renames your
folder to 'foobar1a1u20c' where the appended string would make it unique. It's
not the most elegant way but it works. Moreover, at the end of the day you
would have some CNAME pointing to it, so the name doesn't really matter that
much.

------
insertnickname
Another one...?

