... (FKA Gergely Nagy 🐁)Jun 9, 2024

Lately, I've been thinking about offering managed #Forgejo hosting, aimed at individuals and small businesses. The goal would be to provide something cheap, but reasonable, rather than something that'd scale way too big.

At this time, however, I'm not sure if it's worth the trouble. I mean, I'd love to see more Forgejo instances, because I'd like to believe that the future is many small instances, rather than a few big ones. But offering such managed hosting comes with significant work, and non-negligible costs, especially if I need to rely on something like Stripe for payment processing.

The exact details are TBD, but this would let you use your own domain, and would include backups, forgejo actions runner, and probably a few other things (cpu, ram, and disk - no idea yet at the moment). The entire stack would be free software, including any tooling I make for supporting the setup.

To help me gauge the viability of this idea, lets run a little experiment: assuming I'd offer managed hosting starting at €25 / month or thereabouts, with more expensive tiers also being available, would you be interested?

Boost appreciated, and feel free to ask about or comment on the idea too. This is just a very early exploration, really.

Yes, I might be interested.
21.3%
No, I would likely not be interested.
50%
Undecided (show me the results)
28.7%
Poll ended at .
Show threadUckermark MacGyver Jun 9, 2024
@algernon my thinking would be that any company that doesn't trust the large central hosters would probably just host Forgejo themselves than paying another small 3rd party.
Show thread... (FKA Gergely Nagy 🐁)Jun 9, 2024

@maxheadroom It's not just about trust. The major Forgejo instance is Codeberg, and Codeberg does not allow non-free software, and tries to discourage private repos too.

My managed hosting would offer companies an opportunity to:

  • Use their own domains.
  • Not be bound by Codeberg's ToS, thus, use private repos as they see fit, host as much proprietary code as they wish.
  • Customize their instance as they see fit, including both configuration and theming & branding.
  • Have a likely smoother, more responsive instance (due to size: Codeberg is big, and that often slows it down considerably).

I can very likely offer other optional perks like sending backups to wherever they want, or manage Forgejo on their infra, so they own it 100%.

It's not just about trust. Performance, branding play a larger role, I believe.

Show threadUckermark MacGyver 
@algernon are you able to offer contractual service level agreements? Another thing that is very laborious is certifications. At a certain level companies require certifications and/or audits from their suppliers. Offering things like ISO 27001, SOC2 etc. might be a requirement for certain companies.
Jun 9, 2024 at 3:01pmWeb
Show thread... (FKA Gergely Nagy 🐁)Jun 9, 2024

@maxheadroom I should be able to offer contractual SLAs, yes.

Certificates and audits - likely not. My gut feeling is that companies needing those aren't my target audience either. I have no desire to host managed instances for Big Companies. There would likely be more money in there, sure, but also more stress, and I don't need more stress in my life.