... (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 threadAndreas FrackowiakJun 9, 2024

@algernon The #SME (small and medium-sized enterprises) that I know mostly choose self-hosting because they don't trust #Atlassian, #Github, #Gitlab in terms of stability and protection of their closed source or they have high load requirement.

If you host managed instances for companies, that would in a certain way also be a type of centralization, albeit on a different level than Atlassian, Github, Gitlab, Codeberg.

What would your #Forgejo service do better than #Codeberg, for example?

Show thread... (FKA Gergely Nagy 🐁)Jun 9, 2024

@af For one, Codeberg does not allow hosting non-free software, let alone closed source. While you can create private repositories, hosting closed source there is against the ToS.

With what I'd provide, an SME would be able to (compared to Codeberg):

  • Use their own domain.
  • Not be bound by Codeberg's ToS, and host their own private repositories.
  • I'd provide Forgejo Action runners.
  • Commercial support, if need be (including support for CI).
  • It'd be their instance, with their orgs, users, free for them to customize as they see fit. Branding included.
  • Provide a faster experience than Codeberg (due to size: Codeberg is big, an SME's instance would be much more responsive, simply because there aren't tens of thousands of users and repos).

On top of that, I could, maybe, if there's interest, offer options like sending backups to wherever the SME wants me to send them; or running & managing Forgejo on their infra, so they can 100% own their data, I'd just do the managing part.

Think of it as a bit like toot.io (or masto.host), but for Forgejo.

Show threadAndreas FrackowiakJun 9, 2024

@algernon Ok, hosting non-free/close source would be a big advantage over Codeberg. I think your service could potentially be attractive for this target group.

Maybe it could also be interesting for those who don't care if they use Gitea, Forgejo, Gitlab as long as there is comparable (or better) price, quality and reliability.

Show thread... (FKA Gergely Nagy 🐁)

@af From what I can tell, there aren't many Gitea hosters. Gitea Cloud is priced per user, and I think that pricing model is bullshit, so I'm just... not going to consider that as a comparable thing.

I should've looked at other forge hosters, though, to see how they do their pricing and what they offer. I did that now, and will build that knowledge into a followup poll :)

Jun 9, 2024 at 3:11pmWeb