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Comment by laydn | Hacker News Reader

A few months ago, I made an offer of $100 in one of the freelancing websites, for someone to set-up something like your configuration on one of my Digital Ocean instances. I asked for a few more apps to be installed (git, svn, etc). There were no takers :-)

I think a web site/service which lets you choose "apps" and spawns a VPS instance would be very useful and profitable (Think "ninite for VPS"). I started to work on this but never had the time to continue. With an Ansible/Chef/Puppet recipe, this should be relatively easy to do.

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I believe there were no takers because 100$ for such a setup is completely out of market.

I wouldn't be surprised if a freelancer would charge 100$ per hour to do this kind of work spanning multiple work days.

Seems like https://sandstorm.io/ could be what you are looking for.

Probably not, sandstorm is abandoned, most softwares are broken and unmaintained, gitlab version is from 2016 and full of vulnerabilities, same for WordPress version from 2018. Project is dead. I think the guy behind the project was hired by Cloudflare few years ago

I know that there was some work on reviving sandstorm after Kenton Varda joined Cloudflare, see e.g. https://sandstorm.io/news/2020-02-03-reviving-sandstorm, but it is very possible it never got anywhere. Sad but understandable.

A lot of VPS providers have a catalog of apps to install for you and dump you in a web management console. Sometimes it's handy but usually the security is awful. Back in the day, Webmin was the go-to way to do that and configure your server in general from a web interface

Although not exactly user-friendly, I created my first proper bash script the other day for setting up a postfix server on a vps. You have to create the vanialla vps first but then the script does all of the apt install stuff and then uses awk/sed/whatever to modify config files.

The nice thing is that it is mostly what you would do manually anyway and the commands are unlikely to change much/often since they will install latest versions of postfix etc. when you run the script.

I think this might be more doable since the scripts are easy to create and maintain so perhaps just a site with bash scripts for e.g. "Postfix + Sendmail" or "PHP7 + nginx"

Whether or not you classify it as “easy” isn’t relevant. You hit the nail on the head in the prior sentence: “time” is the issue, and you’re asking someone to trade their time for a pittance.

FWIW I’d charge way more than $100/hr for this work.

I think they mean that if you already have the setup as a provisioning script all you would need to do is to modify it a little, run it and get cash in return.

Something like CapRover wouldn't work for you? Although it's not very up to date. And the one-click collection of apps, is a bit outdated too. You'd need to reference your custom docker images.

Doesn’t DO itself have “apps” ?

Also see Cloudron. Not cheap but I’ve heard that people are very happy with their service. Basically you self host their “app as a service” platform so to speak.

Kind of like a super polished Sandstorm, but totally different sandboxing technologies (believe Cloudron uses Docker but not sure if they still do—- and I believe Sandstorm used Kenton Varda’s cap n proto technology which probably allowed for even greater sandboxing/protection than Docker, I would have to imagine..)..

I used to be a Sandstorm user but yes it was abandoned. Have been a Cloudron guy since the start and have been very happy with it.

This is what we’re building over at https://KubeSail.com :)

Take a look at cloudron.io. It's not open source but sadly sandstorm.io apps have gotten out of date.

year 2000 called, they are asking for cpanel back

You can choose apps and spawn a VPS on DO already.

But can you install multiple apps on one instance?

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