Cloud in a Bottle: Making Self-Hosting as Easy as Using a Smartphone

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.

There is a bit more mature project that does the same: https://selfprivacy.org

"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.

I recently bought a motherboard for my first self made pc. Six to eight sata slots is already enormous and the fact that you pay once and use your hardware freely opened my eyes. I was paying a subscription for cloud 1 tb for a trivial service. I am now hoarding my torrents worry free and plan to convert it to NAS. However i do still use my onedrive plan shared with three friends for 10 dollars for sharing large files till i set up my own nas with a good permanent net connection. The other issue is that I’m renting currently and if I’m changing countries I’ll have to rely on the onedrive again

I'm confused, isn't a self-hosted cloud something like openstack or kubernetes?

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/

Making self-hosting really accessible isn't that easy, even if it's easy to setup the server machine itself.

One needs to make their server machine accessible to everyone, which isn't generally possible due to how networks work, one needs a white IP address and making sure no incoming connections are rejected by the internet provider.

Also one needs a domain. Obtaining it requires some bureaucratic burden, costs money and pricing isn't always transparent.

These barriers are high enough, so that common people can't create/host their own sites. Only skilled enthusiasts or professionals can afford having their own site.