The bmannconsulting.com website
bmann.ca
1---
2tags:
3 - BringYourOwnServer
4 - selfhosting
5link: https://cloudron.io
6---
7[Cloudron](https://www.cloudron.io/?refcode=b90d0ee382ac47ba) is a complete solution for running apps on your own server.
8
9It fits into a category of [[selfhosting]] -- you provide the server either at home or in the cloud, and Cloudron helps you manage the entire server including installing and updating apps, managing DNS, running email, backups, operating system updates, user accounts, and so on.
10
11The [about page](https://www.cloudron.io/about.html) also uses the term [[private cloud]].
12
13It's designed to run on Ubuntu LTS versions. The server interface will take care of keeping the Ubuntu operating system packages maintained.
14## License
15The Cloudron code itself is source-available, with a [subscription license](https://www.cloudron.io/legal/license.html) required if you want to self host more than 2 apps and have full access to all features like email. Paying for the license means the team supports you in the forums and will help troubleshoot via email.
16
17The team creates, contributes to, and directly supports a [number of open source packages](https://www.cloudron.io/opensource.html). All of the app packages that are deployed on Cloudron are open source.
18
19A number of app packages they support installing (e.g. Atlassian Confluence, Outline, Cal.com) have various non-commercial / subscription required licenses as well.[^licensing]
20
21[^licensing]: I have a whole page on [[Open Source Licensing]]. There will definitely be people who don’t like Cloudron because it’s “not open source”. If anything, I don’t think they’re charging ENOUGH. It would be interesting to see if license holders “voted” for the software packages they want to allocate resources to.
22## Cost
23
24* Cloudron license: $15/month, paid annually
25* Backup: $5USD/month
26* Hosting: $11USD/month[^hostingcost]
27
28Total: $31USD per month, $372USD per year.
29
30[^hostingcost]: This is a minimal VPS with 8GB of RAM. A larger VPS, or bare metal instance would cost more but could also support more services.
31
32For many services like email ($5-$10/user/month), file sharing ($5-$10/user/month), calendaring ($5-$10/user/month), you can quickly see that ~5 users of a hosted service will be more expensive than the hosting costs of a Cloudron powered server. If we benchmark $10/user/service as a typical service cost, Cloudron hosting can be much cheaper.
33
3410 users = $100/month, vs $30 Cloudron costs.
35
36That does assume someone willing to do basic Cloudron admin. You don't need to use the command line, but you do need to be familiar with DNS, email, and other services with API keys and relatively technical settings.
37### Backup
38
39[[Digital Ocean]] has [Spaces storage starting at $5](https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces) for up to 250GB. [Cloudron lists all of the storage providers they support](https://docs.cloudron.io/backups/).
40### Hosting
41#### OVH Bare Metal Servers
42For [[CoSocial]], I wanted to keep hosting in Canada. OVH has a data center in Quebec and low cost bare metal servers.
43
44Example OVH for $29.99CAD/month
45* Intel Xeon E3-1245v2 - 4 c / 8 t - 3.4 GHz / 3.8 GHz
46* Memory: 32 GB DDR3
47* Storage: 2 x 480 GB SSD SATA Soft RAID
48
49A bare metal server will be able to host many more apps than a VPS, but it's also a single point of failure: if something goes wrong with the hardware of that server, that's your problem.
50
51#### Hostinger VPS
52
53
54
55For the difference in price, I'd recommend at least the KVM 4 with 16GB RAM. Those are USD prices. You can use my referral code for one-click Cloudron installs on a [Hostinger VPS](https://hostinger.com/vps-hosting?REFERRALCODE=1BORIS58)
56#### Home Hosting
57I have an install on my [[Lenovo M900 Tiny]]. Refurbished or re-purposed hardware can be cheap, but it's also more things you have to know about, and home Internet connections can be unstable.
58### DNS and Domains
59
60You'll need at least one domain name and more likely will have at least 2, so add another $10 - $30 per year in domain registration fees.
61
62Cloudron will automatically [manage all your DNS settings for you](https://docs.cloudron.io/domains/) if you add them using a registrar that supports API access. [[deSEC]] is a great no-charge open source DNS hosting provider.
63### Email
64
65For production services of things like mailing lists, you may have trouble with deliverability of self-hosted email. You can [setup SMTP relay](https://docs.cloudron.io/email/#relay-outbound-mails) from a number of different providers. Any provider that provides SMTP services will work.
66
67There are some apps (like Ghost) that [require Mailgun](https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/ghost/#bulk-emails) for their subscription services.
68
69Example starter pricing: Postmark $15USD/month, Mailgun is free for up to 10,000 emails and the first paid plan is $35USD/month for up to 50K emails.
70
71## Apps
72The [Cloudron store lists all the apps they support](https://www.cloudron.io/store/index.html). It uses [[Docker]] images to package apps, but then runs centrally managed services like database, redis, files, email, etc.
73
74There are many "open source clones" of various commercial services. Listing them this way may help people find apps that are new to them or figure out what to look for to meet the needs that they have:
75
76* Dropbox: use Nextcloud for file syncing and sharing.
77* Google Email & Calendar: SoGo or Nextcloud both have webmail that can sync contacts and calendars
78* Airtable, Typeform: NocoDB has both Airtable-like interfaces for spreadsheet style data storage, as well as a survey mode that could be used instead of Typeform.
79* Figma: Penpot
80* 1Password, LastPass: Vaultwarden is the self-hostable backend that connects with Bitwarden apps
81* Zoom, Google Meet: Jitsi does video-based. Nextcloud Talk is another alternative.
82* Slack, Microsoft Teams: Mattermost chat
83* Help Scout, Shared Email Inbox: FreeScout
84* Mailchimp: Listmonk
85
86And there are open source apps that are themselves well-known that can be complicated to install or maintain:
87
88* Mastodon, ActivityPub enabled micro-blogging
89* Discourse, forum and community server
90* Gitlab, self hosted Github alternate. Gitea, a simpler "forge" software is also available
91* Peertube, ActivityPub enabled video platform. Can sync with or import from YouTube
92* Wordpress, self-hosted version that is setup and maintained for you
93* MediaWiki, the wiki platform that powers Wikipedia and other sites (DokuWiki, HedgeDoc, WikiJS, Confluence, BookStack, and Outline are other supported apps that are wiki variants with slightly different specializations)
94## Forum
95
96The [Cloudron forum](https://forum.cloudron.io/) has lots of great discussions on apps, setup and use cases, as well as wishlists for new apps, and more.
97
98## Alternatives
99
100See [[Bring Your Own Server]] and also [[Co-op Cloud Alternatives]]