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ablyhost.com

22 pointsmotyar42 comments

So your app is for people who aren’t willing to pay other companies for their private hosting feature… and your plan is to charge those people money?

And your app is for people not technical enough to build or move or even iframe these pages themselves, and your plan is for those people to be messing with DNS records?

Bold strategy.

Thanks, but its not iframe, its proxy.

That is why they said “even iframe” because you get about 80% of the way with an iframe.

Iframes can be blocked quite easily from the origin, so it’s only a solution as long as they deem it to be.

And many sites block by default.

Would there be any way for the origin to block an unwanted CNAME?

What is the point of posting on here if you are going to be so passive aggressive in most of your responses. I just picked this one to reply to, but it could have been any of them.

You built something that will obviously raise questions around pricing and copyright, but you are dismissive of any feedback.

If you want people to invest money and time in your product and risk availability of their content, you should at least have some ready answers to these obvious questions.

Thanks for your feedback!

Its very new and I really don't have all the answers, all of these comments have very valid points and would help a lot to improve this.

Bubble, Webflow and Notion will not be happy that your service takes their custom domain revenue.

How much are you prepared to deal with the legal and technical roadblocks they might try to throw at you? (have you talked to a lawyer? which country? botnets?)

They'll just block the free users on their own service for violating the terms.

Not sure, we ll see

I have mixed feelings about this. It seems wrong to strip the branding and has obvious copyright issues. However, there really is a use case for using web services to build content that you want to host elsewhere. APIs and iframes help but you can only take that so far. For me the bundled hosting in a service is cheap and not particularly valuable. The user experience the author gets is what makes it valuable. Having domains that work across services in a supported way would be super useful.

Thanks.

Its new project, still figuring out the points you mentioned.

It's just a tool, trying to find good use-cases for it.

So it's proxying the original site/page through their own platform using your domain named pointed at their server.

What happens when the original sites start blocking requests from the ably servers?

Yes, they can block via IP, or by domain.

Can you spell "copyright infringement" and "disgorgement of your profits from the infringement"?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504

Will check , thanks

Do you have a plan to avoid turning this into a dream tool for phishing attacks?

Not sure, we can verify users by email, or allow them to run this on paid plans only.

It have the same level of risk as a 'web hosting' service.

From what I gather this can be abused to steal websites. Very cool concept though.

Steal a website? You wouldn't download a car.

Based.

This reminded me of the line from the anti-piracy PSA "You wouldn't steal a car"[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn't_Steal_a_Car

That's exactly where this meme originated, 17 years ago https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/piracy-its-a-crime

Yes is possible.

Knife can be used for cutting vegetables or throat!

> You have your web pages and forms built on other platforms like Bubble, Webflow, Notion, etc. And want to move those webpages under your own "domain name" without using their "custom domain" pricing plans.

Don’t use their pricing plan, use ours instead? Seems unethical even if technically possible.

Ok, thanks.

Just to be clear, I think there's anything inherently wrong with the service. I'm sure there are many good use cases for it.

Advertising it as a way to circumvent another provider's paid plan using their own services is what I believe to be unethical at best.

I disagree there. Let them compete.

Physical analogies are never great for digital, but they’re selling movie tickets at the back door of someone else’s theater.

Will definitely be interesting to see how these services react to having their lunch stolen out from under them. Maybe they’ll be small enough to slip through.

What's the Jurassic Park quote? "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should."

Website of the friend of mine got copied this way. Weird traffic was detected with some analytics tools and then we thought:

1. Why would anybody do anything like that? 2. How do we report it to all the hosters / domain providers we can reach?

With (2) the whole thing might be too problematic to maintain, especially isolating good users from bad guys. Really curious how you're going to solve it, please write more.

Yes, that's the main issue I am concerned about, suggest if you have any idea.

You can require the content creator to add a specific confirmation code / page to their site and you check that before you enable the copying.

Good idea!

I see an ethical aspect of this in data portability: it should be possible to create your web site in one service and then migrate it to another one for hosting (it's your content) whenever you like. I wouldn't proxy all requests through though, so at least add a cache, use the original service as a static-site generator, or do an honest import of the data to your service?

Clever, I can see the need for this. Are you caching, or proxying every request?

What do you do about cookies?

Nothing for cookies, yes it proxy. no caching.

If the service you are proxying offers authentication based on token within cookies, does that mean that you will have access to tokens hosted on the client side? Should you disclose a potential security risk to them (same for credentials interception)?

I like the concept here Motyar! Will be interesting to see how origin services interact with it, as others have said. Best of luck!

Thanks a lot. Add yourself to wailist and will invite you soon to try it.

Better call Saul!

He might help you with legal issues. ;)

So it's just a CNAME record with a legally questionable "branding removal" feature?

No, it ll only move the webpage to your domain name. You have to insert some CSS/JS code or "search and replace" text.

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