Posts made by yeku

@robi Thanks for letting me know.

@marcusquinn We'll see what happens.

@marcusquinn Yeah. I was in a fraternity when I was in college. It was like the movie Animal House... but worse. Looking back on it I'm embarrassed by what I did. But it was fun at the time. College itself was a big waste of time for me.

@jdaviescoates Good! I want them to succeed. I neither want to deal with DevOps freelancers nor do I want to do sys admin myself.

@girish Thanks for letting me know. I wish you well.

@marcusquinn Trying to persuade engineers (and artists) to focus less on engineering (and art) and more on marketing is a constant struggle for me. Engineers and artists invariably create stuff they like yet tend to overlook the actual needs of the customers whom their creations purportedly serve.

Put simply: Hetzner's VPSes are relatively cheap yet (apparently) good. Ensuring one-click Cloudron exists on Hetzner VPS is a "non-trivial" marketing issue, although it is an irrelevant engineering issue.

@girish Thanks for letting me know. I appreciate that. After glancing at https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/4423/what-s-coming-in-cloudron-7-0 I became queasy (nauseous). I am being serious. I am neither an engineer, nor do I like engineering. But I've done enough basic system administration (and played a little with Ansible and Terraform) to understand the web of complexity you guys will need to overcome to turn cloudron into a viable company.

The belief that "DevOps will make things easier" is true... for end users like me. But for engineers like you, the reverse is true. Sys admins needed to do a lot of repetitive (grunt) work. But nowadays DevOps has essentially transformed system administration into a form of software development which, I suppose, you probably find interesting.

Without engineers the rest of us would be living in trees and caves. Keep up the good work!

@girish I'm sorry. I misunderstood you. No. Cloudron is not available on Hetzner. But it should be.

That is a H-U-G-E oversight. It is also one of Cloudron's myriad egregious marketing errors. (Yes, sadly I have had the displeasure of watching many engineers destroy promising startups because, well, engineers are often good at engineering yet generally bad at running businesses).

Hetzner is cheaper than Digital Ocean and Vultr. Using Vultr's One-Click Cloudron install would cost me 10 US dollars per month because, well, because when I clicked on Vultr's One-Click Cloudron install I was automatically upgraded to a ten US dollars per month VPS.

Yet, if I were to install the applications I want to run manually (without using Cloudron but instead by entering commands into a terminal), I would probably actually only need a two US dollars and fifty cents per month server on Vultr.

I'm not being cynical but, well, hmmm... to increase your chances of success you need to try to decrease your customers' costs. For more information please see Laws of Tech: Commoditize ​Your Complement.

If you "do the math" I could spend a few hours to manually install the applications I want to use and then pay Vultr two dollars and fifty cents per month. Or I could pay Cloudron fifteen US dollars per month and pay Vultr ten US dollars per month to run those same apps.

Because I probably wouldn't upgrade the apps for, let's say, three years the difference would be seventy-five US dollars versus seven hundred and fifty dollars US dollars. For six hundred and seventy five US dollars I would probably choose to install the apps manually.

A good technical product does not sell itself. In other words, "Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door" is false. (Ralph Waldo Emerson was a nincompoop). Put more bluntly: bad marketing can easily destroy a startup. Just as good engineering does not merely involve using formulas to crunch numbers, good marketing does not merely consist of hand-waving. In other words, just as good engineering is difficult, so too good marketing is also difficult.

Homework assignments in the form of problem sets are easy for teaching assistants in universities to grade but they do not properly prepare engineering students for the reality of engineering in a business environment. Without a basic grasp of accounting, finance, marketing, and above all else, management, most young engineers tend to struggle to deal with the cold, hard realities they encounter in the work world.

@girish I am sorry but I am not interested proofreading https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/docs.

I repeat: I suggest you pay a freelancer on Fiverr.com to proofread https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/docs.

I suggest you contact a dozen or so freelancers on Fiverr.com. (By the way, they are referred to as "sellers" not "freelancers" on Fiverr.com). I suggest you ask them simply, "How much would you charge to proofread/clean up https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/docs?"

I would guess you would need to pay, say, 10 US dollars to 20 US dollars to each freelance proofreader whom you were to engage. I suppose a native speaker who enjoys and is good at proofreading, would need to spend approximately an hour to complete the task properly.

However, you might need to test out several freelancer proofreaders before you find one you like. I guess the project might cost you guys somewhere around 60 US dollars for three freelance proofreaders instead of, say, around 50 US dollars, because, if I am not mistaken, Fiverr would charge you a 20% fee.

However, once you find a freelancer you like, you'd probably be able to work with that person on an ongoing basis because I assume proofreading/editing text on cloudron.io would be easy work for a native speaker who enjoys that sort of work.

Like most startups, cloudron.io will probably fail. To increase your chances of success you guys need... 2b sur yur websight luks proofesional.

Because you are a non-native speaker—who I presume is an engineer—frankly, you'll probably never be a good writer in the English language. But well, hmmm... at the end of the day: who cares? None of us are good at everything; to earn money we only need to be good at something marketable!

@marcusquinn I created a ticket on Hetzner a couple of hours ago with the following information....

Hetzner now offering some useful pre-built "Apps" for server instances.
https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/5544/hetzner-now-offering-some-useful-pre-built-apps-for-server-instances

Cloudron.io is “the bees knees” https://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/idiom-day-the-bees-knees#:~:text=When you refer to something,are a number of theories.

DigitalOcean and Vultr offer one-click install https://www.cloudron.io/get.html. Why not Hetzner?

It seems that Cloudron currently targets customers who probably wouldn't generally be willing to pay for High Availability (HA). But I suppose they might be willing to pay one or two US dollars a month for what I think of as "Pretty High Availability" (PHA).

PHA would dovetail nicely with the idea that disruptive innovations (see The Innovator's Dilemma) are usually much worse yet also much cheaper than somewhat similar incumbent products.

In this case, instead of HA—five-nines of availability (99.999% availability)—how about how aiming for two-nines of availability (99%)? Of course 99.999% is better than 99%. I know it is. But, those extra three-nines are probably too expensive for the overwhelming majority of customers Cloudron currently targets.

Let's imagine a Cloudron user named David has an account at Digital Ocean and another account at Hetzner. Let's suppose that David doesn't want to pay to have two VPSes on 24/7/365. Normally he only wants to pay for one VPS to be on 24/7/365. (After all, David needs money for important things... like beer and more beer). Ok. Fine. Let's say David rents (buys) a VPS at Hetzner and has his data backed up every 6 hours to Backblaze.

Now, let's say David has set up monitoring that runs on Cloudron to monitor his VPS at Hetzner. And then yes.... oh Noooo! The dreaded day finally arrives! His VPS at Hetzner goes down for 15 minutes! Not only does the world stop rotating on its axis but far, far, far more importantly two of his 179 customers who pay him $5 per year for access to his world-famous website, https://DavidsMinecraftTipsAndTricks.com are unable to access the site!

Surely you are thinking something like: David stands to lose millions of dollars in future revenue and these two poor souls who had been on his website will be scarred for life!

But wait! Just hold on. Ok? See, Cloudron has a solution! It's an imperfect solution. But it's a solution nonetheless. While David is sitting on a beautiful, warm, white sand, tropical beach staring out at the crystal blue water, with a beer in nestled in one hand and a beautiful young woman cozily sitting in his lap, blissfully unaware of the tragedy occurring... a rescue plan has already begun to be automatically implemented.

See, a script running on Cloudron will have detected the 15 minute outage on David's VPS at Hetzner. That script will then create a new VPS at Digital Ocean, update the DNS record, and voila... David will have, unbeknownst to him, reap the benefits of PHA (Pretty High Availability )!

Yes. I realize that updating the DNS record can take up to 72 hours. But perhaps something similar to what is explained in Secondary DNS - Deep Dive, and Configuring Secondary DNS might help to cut that time down significantly.

Essentially I am imaging an inexpensive means of moving away from servers as pets and towards servers as cattle. Please see, The History of Pets vs Cattle and How to Use the Analogy Properly.

@girish You missed Hetzner.

@girish I presume you guys will ignore "Cloudron Pro" for now because it's an obvious example of scope creep (feature creep). I assume focusing on it now would cause Cloudron to go out-of-business.

For example, if Cloudron had just raised a series B round of, say, 20 million US dollars then, I suppose, working on Cloudron Pro might make sense.

I suggest you pay a freelancer on Fiverr.com to proofread https://docs.cloudron.io/ because they are riddled with egregious spelling and grammar errors. For example...

dis no look vry proofesional.

Does it?

Pro tip: Spellcheckers are a thing. Use them when creating verbiage that will be customer-facing!

whn u chats wiz ur frends, speling annd gramar nott soo importunt.

But if you want people to pay you $180 per year to use Cloudron, well, ummm, yeah... break out that spiffy little spellchecker you've got gathering dust in your closet (/sarcasm) and pay a native speaker to proofread your text.