Is it really difficult to manage a server?

[murgero]

@plusone-nick If it helps - I just went to the site and the sale ends in 10 hours, so it seems legit.

That said, for $60 a year for 8GB RAM, 80GB SSD, 2 vCPU, 4TB transfer isn't terrible. Kimsufi is a bit more expensive but you get REAL hardware not a KVM. The best value at ssdnodes though is definately the 109/year plan.

[scooke]

@plusone-nick I've been with ssdnodes for a long time, and yeah, the sales are always happening. And sadly, the price often listed is the yearly price of a 3-year term! They had a blog post awhile back where they said they had received backlash about the pricing (people didn't like to see a low price and think that was available for just one year only to discover that is the yearly price when 3 years are bought!) and were going to try listing the yearly price upfront (which is higher than the yearly 3-year price, obviously) for a little while to see if sales improve. I guess they decided it was better to show the yearly 3-year price after all. Anyway, I've been using them for awhile, and for the most part I have no complaints. But I've never done any exhaustive comparisons either. I can tell you right now that my Cloudron dashboard tells me that, with my ssdnodes 24GB VPS with a 4GB swap, I am using about 4GB of ram with hourly spikes to 7.5 GB of ram, and a fairly constant 16% of CPU usage, for a Cloudron running (are you ready): 9 WP sites, Pixelfed, Analytics, Bitwarden, Matrix + RIOT, 5 LAMP, Etherpad, Wallabag, SOGO, Vikunja, Mediawiki, plus email for 3 or 4 of those apps. I guess I thought that running so many things that the percentages would be higher than 50 or so; it gave me the impression I could install more. But with the apps listed above, I need to have at least 4 of the 2096MB apps turned off for Cloudron to run without hiccups. But still, thats a lot of stuff on one VPS, I think!

[scooke]

@murgero So, the $60 /year VPS is actual 180 when you go to pay because you are getting that price for a 3-year term. If you buy just year by year then the price is $80. Likewise, the $109 /year is actually $294.30/3yr - you have to buy the 3 year plan. If you don't want to spend 294.30 all at once and prefer year by year then the price is actually $149/1yr. You can see why they got some complaints.

[Felix]

Hi @scooke

In this area, I just left the location empty and installed ghost into the bare domain. That's OK right? What does this mean, btw?

Thank you

[scooke]

@Felix Hi there, yes, you did it! Leaving the Location window blank means the Ghost app will be reachable by the plain domain name, like example.com. Most of mine are installed like that, but a few I actually use the Location, like test.example.com.

For the Location option to work though you need to have a wild card DNS entry, like *.example.com resolving to your VPSs IP. Also, if you want www.example.com to lead to just example.com, then your DNS must have a CNAME entry www for example.com. This is set up at your domain registrar. You can message me directly if you want about this.

[plusone-nick]

@murgero @scooke ohh okay makes sense - yeah that 3 year bundle can be a little misleading. Kinda like domain registrars giving deals for a year @ 5$ then the next years are $40 for example. Thanks for the clarification!

[Felix]

@scooke Thank you. Now I can work the terminal a bit and can install Ghost quick and as needed on Digital Ocean droplets. I'm going to take a basic course on Linux commands and working the terminal now. This seems interesting.

This is bringing me back to when I was a kid hanging out on IRC channels and getting MP3's and Video Games through CD and LS commands on my old IBM box.

When using Cloudron, should I just use one overall email for all apps? or are accounts specifically tied to domains? so my.domain will need its own account or can my.domain1 and my.domain2 be managed from one master Cloudron account? With that said can I install Ghost twice from within one account?

Thank you.

[scooke]

@Felix From what I can say off the top of my head, an email is created per app, and uses whatever domain it's been installed at, so cloudronuser@example.com . If there are more than one at a domain, then the email address becomes app1.email@example.com and app2.email@example.com. Once installed some apps let you set the admin email address inside, so you could use the same address for a number of apps. But it is nice, if you use subdomains, to use a variation of the cloudron-suggested email address. You can change it too after its been installed from the app dashboard in Cloudron (not just the in-app dashboard).

So yep, you could install many Ghosts on one domain, but you'd have to choose a new subdomain for each, you can't have more than one app accessible at the same domain (this is the same situation if you were rolling everything by hand too). I have several Ghost and Wordpress installations, some on the same domain (using subdomains). Each Ghost installation is it's own app though (plus whatever else is needed for the app to run), they don't build on each other, which is the Docker-side of things (everything is in its own container).

Yes, it is fun!

[Felix]

@scooke Thank you for the response. Do you maintain all of your Cloudron installations under different emails or one?

[scooke]

@Felix Oops, it was the post about GNU Social that had the bit of text I could see in my head:

INSTALLING
git clone https://git.cloudron.io/murgero/gnu-social gnu-social
cd gnu-social
cloudron install --image=mitchellurgero/org.urgero.gs:latest
Or just clone, build in docker and install like any other non-store app.

A similar process then would apply for yours.

1% of me believes you could maybe be him. That's the wonder of the internet!

I actually have only one Cloudron installation, but I did have two at one point. On my current Cloudron installation I have a ton of apps running, a whole mix. a good portion are managed under one email address, but the rest are just app by app. In reality, most of them don't need to use email. There are still a few more whose email is managed by MXRoute (even though they are assigned an email address by Cloudron I don't use).

[Felix]

@scooke Thank you for that. It clears up a lot of the confusion. I appreciate all of your help throughout this process. Now I can get up and running and launch Ghost at will.