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Comment by marvel_boy | Hacker News Reader

Man, this is disappointing. No way to trust any cloud offering, more sooner than later the service is discontinued.

I agree. I actually referred people to Kimono. I'm so sorry I did. This is unacceptable behavior in this day and age. I mean seriously? Servers are cheap. Keep the thing up for existing users. Don't add new features. Don't invest any more time in the thing. But don't pull the rug from under people's feet. That's just bad form. If this is who Palantir acquires or acquihires, then they have some really bad judgement too. It reflects poorly on Palantir to not care about commitment and responsibility.

It reminds me of a PC World magazine that I had. It took me over a year and a half to get around to reading it. It had an article about the 50 best websites or something like that. By the time I got around to reading it, at least 1/3 of the sites were discontinued.

I was just thinking the same. I rely on Kimono for a few of my sites, so I'm looking around at what I could use instead. The first I thought of is http://import.io/, http://cloudscrape.com, or https://phantomjscloud.com/site/index.html, but I fear the same might happen to whichever I pick.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to run something similar on my own server?

You can use portia[1]. You can try out a hosted version at scrapinghub[2] or you can host your own. It's a web based spider creator like kimonolabs but the spiders it creates are just scrapy spiders. If you need to do something that the UI can't handle it's not a problem, you can extend it with a little python.

[1] https://github.com/scrapinghub/portia [2] https://scrapinghub.com

Download the Kimono desktop tool for Mac and unzip it. It is nothing but a nodejs based web application.

Perhaps a viable alternative to using cloud services would be roll-your-own OSS packages

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