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Looks great! What are the actual countries of the server location in the west/east Europe and planned North/South Asia (and when are they coming out?). Can I get IP addresses of those so I can ping them to see what's best from my location in Australia?
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Appears that they've gone offline, but just realized I'm still getting charged. Can't find a way to contact the company to cancel or request refunds, so about to file chargebacks for the fraudulent recurring charges (still charging for a service that's no longer around? shame on you guys!).
Wanted to post here to see if any of the founders want to provide me with contact information so that they can manually refund the charges vs. getting hit with chargeback fees.
Hi everyone,
Co-founder of Portal here. Our goal is to give everyone the ability to self-host open source apps in seconds.
Portal is a service that lets anyone self-host their own email, blog, vpn, and other cloud services. It's much better than using public cloud services because you control your data, no one tracks what you do, and you can run apps from any developer in the world.
Apps run in isolated virtual machines on your domain and are controlled through a web interface at https://example.com/cloud. Portal is like VPS hosting that "just works" for the average individual. Hackers have the ability to run their own servers from the command line, but normal people don't.
In the past, any developer wanting to create an app for users to run in the cloud had to create a SaaS business to operate it, and users had to trust it enough to sign up. Now, developers can publish apps that users run on their own servers without having to rely on a different SaaS business for each app they use.
We are really excited to get this out there to help make self-hosting possible for everyone!
Thanks for checking us out - we'll be on throughout the day to answer any questions.
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Was it Product Hunt'd Hug of Death?
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@toobulkeh Seems like it. It was working for a short while earlier.
@seanbolak all of the apps (22) on the home page work now. More are added every week. We're also talking to a number of third-party SaaS developers who are interested in letting users self-host their software.
@noxowe it should be possible to run BitNami apps on Portal as well as the reverse. There are some significant differences: Portal runs on bare metal hardware we manage, so we have more control over privacy, hardware quality (Intel v3 processors), and pricing (it's *much* cheaper to run many apps). It also seems like BitNami expects a certain amount of technical knowledge, but that might be something they're working on.
@jake_gold@noxowe Bitnami is a hosting provider too and an app that makes app setup easier. So their install script is like 3 clicks and sometimes you need to provide admin user/pass. That's all. I don't get how can it be easier. Anyway, cool product and I really don't want to seem the asshole guy who just wants to complain so cheers! And I wish you the best!
@noxowe no worries, thank you for your comments. Strangely enough, we actually do hope good direct alternatives to Portal emerge so users feel more comfortable that they can move between services. Making it easy to switch off Portal is one of our design goals. BitNami is interesting and similar in some ways, but there are a number of differences
I don't think it's designed to run multiple apps on the same domain (e.g. a WordPress app VM at https://example.com/ and a Ghost app VM blog at https://example.com/blog/, as one example.) and I think it would be much more expensive to run as many app VMs because of the way memory is priced and because it seems they host on top of other cloud providers.
Thanks again!
Portal
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