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- Hacker News
- If this can largely automate the backup and update side of things, then it seems like a great middle ground for people like me:
I’m trying to self-host as much of my stuff as possible, but don’t have time to tinker like I used to. Hence updates, backups (etc) fall by the wayside in favour of “set and forget”.
by redrix - Sandstorm had a radically more innovative model of hosting: instead of helping you host apps, each document was its own instance. This was really interesting, but as this article notes, did need deep integration with the apps.
I'd be interested to see if your more pragmatic approach plays out. Being able to start by taking apps "off the shelf" largely unmodified, then gradually adding integration via standard proxy features, seems sensible.
In any case, doing single sign on between apps is just a very sensible and worthwhile place to start.
by crabmusket - This pitch is somewhat interesting, but, much like Sandstorm, browsing the library of pre-built apps kind of leaves me cold. It's too much like browsing a rather tiny mobile app store. There are maybe three apps that I might be interested in.
Since we have AI now, I think exe.dev's pitch is better: they provide Linux VMs, a web proxy, and integrations. You can ask the AI to build whatever web app you like. I'd love to have exe.dev, but running on my Mac Mini.
by skybrian - Wouldn't it make more sense to just ask AI to generate the cloud in a bottle files for the apps that are missing from the library?by imtringued
- What apps were you looking for that you wouldn't find in the catalog?by prologic
- > I'd love to have exe.dev, but running on my Mac Mini.
I'm working on exactly this bit (with some more tuning for messaging AI agents)
https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika
Doesn't run on your Mac Mini yet, but should get that enabled either this week or next
If you sign up (free) I'll send you an email when the "Mac Mini mode + full OSS self-hosting" is live
by dbmikus - There seems to be a lot of variance between stated and revealed preferences around self-hosting.
It often seems like presenting the image of being autonomous to our peers seems more important than actually achieving it.
It takes a lot of energy to replicate what AWS and friends have done once we factor in concerns like the passage of time and entropy. I've never been able to keep a media/NAS appliance alive for much longer than 3-4 years. Inevitably, there is some kind of catastrophic event and I have to start all over with new vendors, etc. Even without any data loss this gets old. I promise you get tired of this after a while. It might seem like that would never happen and then one day it does.
You can get so much more done if you can actually afford to use the cloud. I have a really hard time believing that many people are genuinely winning on total cost of ownership with self hosting.
by bob1029 - Yep, even with something like NextCloud or ownCloud it gets tiring pretty fast. I do get the appeal of handling everything on your own, but it also brings any of the downside of handling everything by myself. I just need a working cloud storage with sync, redundancy, and availability. Can I get it up to spec? Definitely but it will cost more both in time and money than getting OOTB solution.
I gave up sync and availability for sensitive data to at-rest encryption. Mundane photos/documents can stay on Google Drive, for now. I wish there's a better solution.
- > if you can actually afford to use the cloud.
If you are an individual and you want to store a media library, you'll go broke instantly.
I have roughly 200TB of storage capacity, 100TB used, in my NAS. That would be $2300/mo on S3 before even getting to access fees and network egress.
by hamandcheese - This is a great idea and I wish it success. Self-hosting shouldn't be a nightmare of researching and setting up 20 different applications.
Is there something similar in progress for a "tech company tech stack"? As in, rather than trying to assemble your own custom infrastructure by finding an RPC system, permissions/group manager, credential management, storage, database, service discovery, job management, monitoring etc. one "opinionated" stack that you can easily deploy, as long as you're OK accepting their choices, with all these parts already bundled and wired up.
- Ruby ln Rails and are you sure you need all that? Do you have dozens of interrelated products with a billion users for each?by lupire
- That sounds like Nextcloudby goobatrooba
- This isn't the hard part of self-hosting, at least not anymore. In the comments here there are lots of examples of similar projects that solve basically the same problem (app selection and deployment). To make self-hosting "easy" we need to solve domain registration, DNS management, and port-forwarding configuration.
This probably requires a project more like OpenWRT that includes an API-driven relationship with a registrar. The lack of a standard (consumer accessible) domain registration API is a huge hole in automating this. If such a project gets some traction, then it could migrate to a physical router that prospective self-hosters could buy. With domain registration, DNS management, and port forwarding all in the router's software, then the remaining hard parts can be sufficiently automated to make self hosting accessible to the average gaming console owner.
by mawise - Insightful comment I fully agree that the hardest part needs to be automated fully, there's plenty of DNS providers with API access so it can be done. Naming is oftentimes the hardest part we have in tech, I dream of a future we are more decentralized and we have alternatives to DNS to access ressources,see this great text by Andrew Nesbitt about the subject of naming: https://nesbitt.io/2026/03/03/package-management-is-naming-a...by jdcaron
- There are many of us who don't need public DNS records and rely on local-only DNS records accessible from outside via Tailscale/WireGuard.by zzen
- Makes me a little sad that it's been almost exactly 6 years since I made this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24475946
In that time I started a domain registrar, a free OpenID Connect login service (https://lastlogin.net/), created the de facto list of tunneling tools (https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling), and built a couple of my own tunneling tools (SirTunnel and boringproxy), all to try and make self hosting easier.
I'm still trying to solve this problem. Some progress has been made (mostly by other projects), but we're still not there.
FWIW, I used to think everyone owning a domain was the way forward. I now suspect otherwise. Domains are too expensive (especially most TLDs outside .com/.net/.org) and the costs of accidentally forgetting to renew are catastrophic. Domains just aren't a consumer product.
I think you only need a domain if you want a permanent public web presence, and I don't think most people need that. Most people just need a better/faster/private google drive, google photos, google docs, etc, and for that it's ok if your domain changes once in a while.
So I think free subdomains set up without vendor lockin are probably the ticket.
If anyone is interested in collaborating in this space, definitely reach out.
by apitman - This is a great project! Yes, the personal cloud is coming and it's going to be for everyone.
I'm working on a project with similar goals but some different design decisions - instead of the typical containers I'm going for thin-client apps that hit a common data layer built on a fully serverless architecture. Not ready for production quite yet, but for those interested: https://starkeep.app/
by kolleraa - I am moving to completely self hosting because of 1 thing.
The availability of good fast cheapish home internet connection.
Would never consider it while it was fibre to the node.
Fibre to the home 1g down and 400 up for $150 aussie. Makes everything viable
by Pushy - "We (Imbue, the company I work for) also offer a managed version, which I think is really important to making this widely accessible - and it gives us a straightforward business model to support the project."
Looking at your hosted page, I see no reference to backups. I see in your docs reference to backup, but you should definitely offer some sort of turnkey, appropriately-marked-up backup solution. Configuration difficulty is what kills self-hosting on the front end, updates make it hard over time, but when it all dies and then I have no backup is when I give up.
I can't find any reference to disk size limits anywhere. Can I host Immich on this? Can I host my media server? What will it cost? Surely not $10/month for my media collection. I'm not a hoarder and mostly have stuff ripped from my personally-owned media, which limits the size, and you're still not hosting that for $10/month. I see you have Jellyfin in the set of apps but I don't know what it will cost. The CPU & RAM limits I understand from the deploy page.
Oh, and I'm specifically referring to your hosted service here.
by jerf - (author here) Thanks for flagging, I should make this more clear. Our managed instances have pretty small disks (~50GB), but there's a way to link a S3 bucket to your instance to use for bulk data storage. Apps that store bulk data (like immich/jellyfin) should automatically put it in the "archive data tier" which can be configured to go into this S3 bucket instead of local storage. We're planning to make this (and backups) an auto-configured part of our managed instances - billed separately (so you pay for just the additional storage you use; cloudflare R2 (S3 compatible) at-cost is like $15/TB/mo so it should be in that neighborhood).
See docs on how this works: https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/how_it_works/data.html#the-a...
by zplizzi - I think the time for this space is here. The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever.
Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry.
by drunner - But this is a company building on AI.by 0c3ca83
- The biggest difficulty is probably that from my observation, there's a sharp cutoff line somewhere between Gen Y and Z where anyone born before that (and don't work in tech) genuinely have no idea how to navigate their digital life and gets preyed on by those subscriptions. And these people are still a super large portion of the population paying for those subscriptions.
Only Gen Z and later are starting to care and willing to spend the time and effort to self host. All the Gen X and Y people that I know of, including many that are very intelligent and accomplished in their field, literally have no idea how to operate a computer outside of watching youtube, checking emails, and opening Word documents. Ads? They hate it but have no idea how to disable them. iPhone running out of storage and iCloud says I can solve that for $2.99/mo? They would be like IDK what that is but sure I'll pay that $2.99 if that means I can record more videos of my kids.
I really hate this situation, and I try my best to help out the folks around me who I see are getting ripped off (either they don't know or they know but think that's what it is). But still, it's really hard to communicate or teach those people when the skill of operating a computer has become intuition and human nature to me. I really can't put these things into words on the fly that would help them understand :(
by GZGavinZhao - Small business might care about the cost of subscriptions if they could get high quality systems this way.by petra
- At the same time buying compute is more expensive than ever, and the gap between homemade projects and what's available online in term of speed, functionality and LLM capacity is bigger than ever.
Building the equivalent of Google Photos locally wasn't that hard 10 years ago, given enough tolerance for speed and indexing lag issues. Trying to do the same today will cost two arms and leg and require a lot more overall knowledge of what to compose to get the same result.
The dust will settle and we should go back to a nearer gap in I hope a few years, until the. it might be a glacier age for self-hosting.
by makeitdouble - How does being docker compose based make it inaccessible?
Self hosting implies having hardware and software knowledge to set it up. I agree, having a meta package that would set the system up as systemd would be an even lower barrier. But then again, there are podman commands that do this for you today anyway.
Self hosting could also imply buying a device that just does this with an additional management interface for updates. This could be build around a nuc/nas with above package. It still will require some knowledge to keep it maintained.
Then, you could offer maintaining them as a service again. Maybe there is value in that.
Update: apparently there is https://freedombox.org/ which is actually an appliance for this. Although it is more privacy focused and I don’t see a productivity or photo suite on it.
by spockz - > The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever.
Only on HN, the general public don't care, they don't even know the name of their web browser.
by cube00 - These guys have been spamming issues in repos trying to promote this project and no disclosure whatsoever that they are associated with the project.
https://github.com/search?q=%22cloudinabottle.toml%22&type=i...
by KomoD - It's only 11 in the last 48h, on lesser known projects.by edoceo
- Disclosure would be nice but 11-12 issues in entire GitHub is hardly spam.by asdf88990