What’s your intention

[onlybro]

Hey everyone would you mind sharing what’s your purpose of running an app ?? Do you run it on your own server or do you spend money on a host ? Is it for leisure purpose or business ?

I of course use digitalocean $18 /month shared cpu I got pixelfed running on it i love to have an instance like Instagram of my own

[d19dotca]

@onlybro For me I run a freelance business for web design and web hosting / email hosting, and more. So I use Cloudron to make managing the whole experience better. Better for me, better for my clients.

I run and support servers as my day-job so I'm very familiar with how to do it, but it's also a real time sink when trying to run a business on top of it, plus the day-job and social life (prior to the pandemic, lol) and more. So Cloudron saves me a ton of time overall which I most appreciate. I used to run everything in Docker containers manually but with some help from Portainer, and while it worked, it just made generally keeping everything up-to-date and managing it much more difficult to do manually, which is where I found Cloudron as a solution.

Where Cloudron really shines for my use-case:

• Managing users (groups, password resets, etc) and the 2FA ability too
• Solid mail server uptime and functionality (though lots of room for improvement )
• The adapted CI/CD workflow is great... Example: I have my client's production websites running, if they need a major change that I need to test first I quickly clone their website from the app backup, make the changes in staging, then once finalized I push it back to production. Only a minute or two of downtime needed when pushing back to production, and makes the whole flow much easier, saving time for me and makes the customer happier as they see more solid uptime and responsiveness
• Security is basically a "default" in Cloudron, so no need to constantly setup and maintain various firewall rules, DNS records for SPF, DKIM, rate limiting included, and more.
• Speaking of DNS... while I currently have opted for the wildcard approach, I used to use it for DigitalOcean and it was a huge time saver at the time when getting things initially setup. It's possible I may go back to managing it in DO too via Cloudron's API integration to DO.
• Many other areas, not to mention the community and team behind it, it's a great product that I hope will succeed long into the future.

For me, since I have paying clients, I rent a server at OVH in Canada, since it means more uptime and less chance of things like power outages, fires, etc (though OVH didn't escape too well in their one region from a fire that broke out in some old infrastructure) compared to the likelihood of those issues if I was running it from home. It also makes it easier to quickly expand on-demand things like disk size compared to having to order in a new disk, manually add or replace it, etc at home. Basically just much better for adaptability and general performance and functionality. However if I was running it just for myself and not paying client's, I'd likely just run a server at home.

[A Former User]

I run a single cloudron for myself (personal/open source work like EleutheriaPay) AND my consulting/hosting business Lahiji Apps Consulting (its kind of like I am my own client here, is how I am justifying it).

I run out of my basement as I hate subscription costs for a VPS and prefer to have a more hands-on approach where I have more fine control over the system. Also I love tinkering and building systems. It hosts client work as my current network solution is now symmetrical gigabit and my clients have been pleased with the performance for the price.

Meaningful Specs:
Ryzen 1700X
64GB DDR4 RAM @ 3200MHz
512GB NVMe Boot SSD
2TB Seagate Barracuda For Client Nextcloud
4TB Seagate Ironwolf for Backups

[mehdi]

I run Cloudron for personal use.

I run it on a rented Dedicated Server at OneProvider, much better bang for the buck compared to a VPS :
CPU: Intel Xeon 4 cores
RAM: 16GB
Hard Drives: 2x 2TB (HDD SATA)
Bandwidth: Unmetered @ 1Gbps
For 25€/month

I have mainly media apps on it (JellyFin, SickChill, ...), but also a few websites with Ghost and Wordpress that I host for friends, and a few utilities (VPN, NextCloud, Etherpad, ...).