Public Beta
A month ago we started the private beta program and we are now comfortable opening up the product to a larger audience.
We are happy to announce that Cloudron has entered Public Beta and invitations are no longer necessary.
What's a Cloudron?
The Cloudron is a managed Smartserver designed to run web applications.
Say you want to run WordPress, Mediawiki, Rocket.chat, or Gogs on your own server. This involves reading installation manuals, provisioning databases and configuring the server. You then need to configure the DNS, install SSL certificates and secure your server. And we haven't even talked about how to backup and update all this configuration and data that are specific to each app.
It's no wonder the world is very happy with SaaS. Maintaining web applications is unrewarding and we are happy to let someone else do it. We, at Cloudron, want to fix just that!
When you sign up, you can create a server with a domain name of your choice. From there on, installing web apps from our Cloudron Store is just a click away. Backups, updates, SSL certificates, security fixes are all taken care of.
Pics or it didn't happen
We have something better than pics!
Here's a live demo (username: cloudron password: cloudron).
There's a lot more to it
We didn't stop there. You can add your family or team members to your server easily. The icing on the cake is that Cloudron Apps can integrate with one of the many authentication strategiesallowing the users to use the same credentials in all the apps.
It's a platform
The Cloudron runs the Smartserver platform. Among other things, the platform implements a heroku-style PaaS for your server.
We don't have an army of Dobbys managing your server! The server software is smart enough to take care of itself most of the time. Manual intervention is sometimes required and this is what makes the Cloudron a managed Smartserver.
We will have some announcements about our platform later this month.
Developers
Anyone can develop apps for the Cloudron. We have made some apps on our own and you can see the initial app list at the Cloudron Store. If you are a developer, be sure to view the docs and the app code.
We are buzzword compliant: Docker, NoSQL database, Let's Encrypt, we have it all :-)
Exciting times
While there are many use cases for the Cloudron, our personal vision is a world where families and teams can have their own Smartserver. We would love to have you on board.