Always interesting to see more and more startups popping up in the static hosting space. Since we launched a year ago there's been at least 6 other entering the space.
Right now it looks like your main selling point is price.
Think carefully about whether that's the way you want to go. The real competitors here is the humongous shared hosting market, and the big players there have much deeper pockets and far better economies of scale than any startup.
With a $1/site price you'll pretty much never have a chance to make paid advertising a viable customer acquisition channel and as someone else mentioned, think about what the price of giving any kind of support will be. The lower end of the market will (in my experience) also be the place where people will need the most help with stuff like DNS setup, or basic issues such as not having an index.html file, etc, etc.
It is not to store content but the ability to create new sites just by creating a new folder, e.g. if you create a new folder in 'Dropbox/Apps/websrvr' called 'apple314159' you would have a new website created and online at 'http://apple314159.websrvr.in/' and you could manage your website through your local computer.
Dropbox doesn't play well with git, or perhaps version control in general. Having a live site which is unversioned is somewhat less than desirable. I am sure there is some category of people for whom this is useful, but I am a professional, which means I have been burned too many times to consider not using version control. Hence, this service is entirely useless to me.
Hiding complexity from the user is mostly good; it's a shame that the replication service isn't more capable.
You could still use git to version your website and then websrvr to host your website. I do it for 'http://www.websrvr.in/', you can checkout (https://github.com/websrvr/www.websrvr.in/) for it's source code. I use middleman to build the app and use the "~/Dropbox/Apps/websrvr/wwww" folder as the target folder, it's works out nicely.
I keep about a dozen personal, non-critical projects in Dropbox. All are versioned with git, and it works great. Dropbox itself is versioned (since I'm a paying subscriber), so I have two layers of security there.
What negative experiences have you had with Dropbox + VCS?
Maybe it's better now, but I've had problems with .git folders in dropbox. Dropbox doesn't understand the directory structure and conflicts are handled by merging competing .git folders and renaming internal files as needed -- almost certainly not what you want.
I can't speak for before I started using Dropbox with git, but for the past 3 years, conflicts are handled well (and not as you describe).
First of all, Dropbox will not overwrite data. If it finds a conflict, it will save a second file with "[machine name]'s Conflicted Copy" and the modification date at the end.
This hasn't happened to me with any git files yet, however, because my machines are always online. That means my working tree is always the same across devices and my .git folder is always identical.
The only way a conflict would be created is if I committed while working offline and then committed on another machine while working offline.
If that happens, I could just grep my Dropbox folder for files with "conflicted" in the name and remove them. Or, because I committed my files to a remote (often Github, but sometimes others), I could just delete the local copy and clone.
Sure, I'm not suggesting there would be permanent data loss... but doesn't Dropbox renaming a bunch of files deep within .git folder result in an unusable repository that you'd have to fix by hand or restore from backup?
This whole discussion made me curious, so I tested it. Dropbox doesn't rename files. It creates new files. All you have to do is delete the new files (which are really "forks" of your current data) and you have your working tree synced with your data store again. It's really easy.
Storing .git folders in dropbox doesn't seem like the best idea. You could keep a git repository in a different location and have a small build script like this https://github.com/minhajuddin/notes.minhajuddin.com/blob/ma... which builds your website and copies it to a dropbox folder. With this approach you could even use something like http://middlemanapp.com/.
I have 2+ side projects or submodules under development at any given time. I've been storing them in Dropbox for the last 3 years. I've been working on them actively from 3 different machines (two Ubuntu desktops and one OS X laptop), and they're turned off -- so not syncing -- when I'm not using them.
All that said, I haven't had one single problem. So empirically speaking, I don't see any problem with the mechanics of .git folders in Dropbox.
(Note that my key files, API keys, etc. are not synced to Dropbox.)
I have had many instances of copies of files being created when there is a conflict. This shouldn't happen if the syncs happen before you work on a file (which is your situation). The main issue for me is that dropbox doesn't explicitly tell you that there is a conflict, it just creates a file with the other machine's name and you may end up scratching your head for a long time before figuring out about the conflict.
To be honest, I haven't tried storing git repos on Dropbox so these are just my assumptions based on dropbox usage for other files. I am just afraid that it may end up corrupting my git repo.
Value prop is obvious: do you change your car's oil yourself or take it to the shop? Some DIYs will set this up on AWS while others will find it 'convenient' to spend $3/mo and be done with it.
Time before when Canonical announce Ubuntu One was going to be discontinued I comment how I depend on U1 to deploy my static websites, like 30 static websites some of them with simple .php scripts that manage contact forms or feed aggregation, it's pretty easy to do and still don't get why so much people put so much effort on making it a SaaS, we are talking about a little sysadmin work.
I have no option that use Dropbox as a backend as most of my clients use it, but it's pretty obvious you can setup the same features with other services.
Uptime for an instance that will only serve static content? do we are not just delegating to much? We are talking about a Nginx configuration and a little of sysadmin work.
Congratulations on your development. It seems this has been done before, and albeit it is neat what is the benefit over a low-cost "standard" webhost? I can name a few webhosts that are in the $3-5 range and offer standard tools and the ability to install a SSL.
The benefit is that you don't have to connect to your webhost over FTP and change files, instead you could just open your file from your dropbox edit it and be done with it. And to create a website all you need to do is create a folder and put your html into it.
Thanks for the feedback :)
I would love to hear about features which might make you consider this service.
I build static sites/apps that use saas tools for the dynamic content. For example, a post's comments are stored on parse.com However, this architecture chokes on IE8/7 unless CORS is handled through SSL. How would I install SSL in your service?
I have SSL support planned in the near future (1-3 months) if people ask for it. It would require you to upload the private/public keys to websrvr. Thanks for the question :) I was really planning for SSL support because of google's announcement to bump SSL sites in their listings, I wasn't aware of the CORS issues with IE.
Yes, a little bit like that. However, this is part of our core business so I think that gives us a bit of an advantage. For instance, just today we released the ability to minify css/html/js and also gzip it to the highest compression so that websites hosted on websrvr perform better. For www.websrvr.in's homepage I see a decrease in size from 8799 to 2649 bytes which is a decrease in size by 70%.
Gotcha. I use precompilers which take care of file concatenation and minification, but I never could get gzipping to work. Are you targeting devs that probably use github already or not tech folk?
Yeah, I am targeting devs and designers, I used to publish my blog posts using jekyll and git on my own server, and it is a bit tedious to push on every typo correction :)
Some time back, I was in the market for similar sevices, I evaluated brace.io and site44. If I am not wrong, they both charge $5/month for 5 websites. As a user, I would not mind paying that, because if I want to quickly demo to a client, I would prefer a separate sub-domain/folder without having to pull my credit card for that.
Second, I was looking for minification and compression, great to see that you have added that feature.
Third, great to see that you have contact forms, the first obstacle where you might think of servers. I like brace.io's implementation.
Additionally I liked brace.io's admin and shipping workflow. Do you have anything similar?
You don't really have to enter your payment information every time you create a website. Once you signup, you can make a deposit for $3 and we'll charge you only when you create a folder in your dropbox (that too 1 hour after you create the folder in case it was done by a mistake). Also, even if you don't have any funds in your account your websites will be live, we'll send you an email to clear your invoices :) In short, all you have to do to create a website is create a folder with an index.html file. I am also the creator of http://getsimpleform.com which is a service which allows simple contact forms with akismet integration for spam prevention, it also allows you to use templates for the email notifications on form submissions. websrvr will have all that functionality and a bit more :)
Not sure what's your target, but your pricing plan shows the main differentiator being where the website is hosted (your server vs S3 vs Cloudfront) which requires people to be familiar with AWS services to understand the difference. Then you don't say how your servers are connected to the internet, what uptime they have, etc.
My suggestion would be rephrasing without mentioning AWS (unless it's a specific user-level features like "upload to your own S3 bucket" or something like that).
Thanks for the feedback, I'll change the copy hosting it off of S3 or Cloudfront definitely adds to the cost that's why there is a price difference. I should make the text more understandable.
I deploy a statically generated site by pushing/pulling a production version from git.
My feedback is that I don't have any pain points with my current work-flow. I would fear your service & dropbox to actually cause problems and be less useful than git.
Sorry to be a downer :) What advantages do you think your service would offer me?
Thanks for the feedback. Do you use github pages? or a server of your own? In the near future I am planning to allow users to host their sites on Amazon S3 and Cloudfront, that should remove the fear of reliability and also be a good feature. I understand that it may not be very appealing to people who can setup their own servers, but I foresee it being useful to many designers.
Ah, I see. I didn't realise you are offering hosting. "Deploy your websites from dropbox." makes me think its just a deployment tool for existing servers.
If its for designers, then with a better tag-line, I expect you can make creating a website from a drop-box folder sound like magic.
I don't foresee a lot of issues once a user gets the hang of it, and I am expecting each user to have approximately 10 websites which should eventually pay off. Hopefully it works out :) I will also increase the amount of documentation/videos which should reduce the support required.
Thanks :)
I didn't really do any research on that expectation, but from my personal experience many designers can host their clients' websites if they can get an inexpensive and reliable host, websrvr is trying to be that.
Great question :)
If the folder name 'foobar' is taken, the app renames your folder to 'foobar1a1u20c' where the appended string would make it unique. It's not the most elegant way but it works. Moreover, at the end of the day you would have some CNAME pointing to it, so the name doesn't really matter that much.
Always interesting to see more and more startups popping up in the static hosting space. Since we launched a year ago there's been at least 6 other entering the space.
Right now it looks like your main selling point is price.
Think carefully about whether that's the way you want to go. The real competitors here is the humongous shared hosting market, and the big players there have much deeper pockets and far better economies of scale than any startup.
With a $1/site price you'll pretty much never have a chance to make paid advertising a viable customer acquisition channel and as someone else mentioned, think about what the price of giving any kind of support will be. The lower end of the market will (in my experience) also be the place where people will need the most help with stuff like DNS setup, or basic issues such as not having an index.html file, etc, etc.
Good luck!