from Hacker News

Show HN: Webapp.io - Free firecracker-based full-stack hosting

by colinchartier on 2/3/23, 10:35 PM with 43 comments

• by d3nj4l on 2/4/23, 2:11 AM

  You're really going to run into trouble with the "no credit card required" thing - people are going to use your service to, at worst, spam and abuse other people and, at best, mine crypto.

• by colinchartier on 2/3/23, 10:35 PM

  Hey HN,

  We recently finished our firecracker-based webapp hosting platform.

  It's like if Vercel and Docker had a baby: You write VM configurations in a language that looks like a Dockerfile, and every commit creates a preview environment which can be "promoted" to a production site.

  Here's an example configuration:

  ``` FROM vm/ubuntu:18.04 RUN curl -fSsL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | sudo -E bash RUN apt-get install nodejs COPY . . RUN npm install RUN npm run build RUN BACKGROUND npm run start EXPOSE WEBSITE localhost:3000 ```

  This product combines our firecracker-based hypervisor (200ms cold starts) with a global CDN written in Go (using Caddy for TLS termination)

  We can offer everything for free because we charge for the DevOps side (CI/CD & preview environments) - we have no intention of getting users and then upselling people for hosting.

  We're obviously very excited about this launch, and would love to hear your feedback.

• by solatic on 2/4/23, 6:28 AM

  What's the strategy for dealing with persistent data? (Postgres, KV store, whatever)? How do I set that up and connect to it?

  If you're running in AWS (looks like it), how do I set up private networking with RDS?

• by radiojasper on 2/4/23, 1:53 AM

  Your Docs [0] and Examples[1] page, or many [2] other page in the footer for that matter, return a blank page?

  [0] https://webapp.io/docs/main

  [1] https://webapp.io/docs/examples

  [2] https://webapp.io/docs/integrations

  Firefox, latest version, no ad blocker enabled. After nosing around in your source a bit, it seems the redirect to https://docs.webapp.io doesn't work for me?

• by sosodev on 2/4/23, 1:43 AM

  Why would I use this over fly.io? It seems to be very similar at first glance

• by nextaccountic on 2/4/23, 8:06 AM

  When creating an account with Github, why do you ask permission to "act on my behalf"? There is no such permission when creating an account with Google

• by langsoul-com on 2/4/23, 6:54 AM

  Fly.io has no credit card free hosting for a bit, then immediately stopped due to insane bot abuse.

  Might wanna check their article, because you may face the same problems.

• by mleonhard on 2/4/23, 8:36 AM

  We need our server to run very close to our database, preferably in the same datacenter. Does webapp.io support that yet?

• by nickphx on 2/4/23, 3:20 AM

  I signed up and tried to authorize a single github repo, I received a '500 error' from https://webapp.io/api/after_github_oauth?code=&installation_...

• by ushakov on 2/4/23, 8:55 AM

  Any chance you will open-source this?

• by hobo_mark on 2/4/23, 12:58 PM

  This application will be able to:

  - Access the authenticated user's API Grants complete read/write access to the API, including all groups and projects, the container registry, and the package registry

  Why is write access necessary?

• by lyeniac on 2/3/23, 10:36 PM

  Hey HN! Co-founder of webapp.io here. Looking forward to your feedback :)

• by NayamAmarshe on 2/4/23, 2:22 AM

  Looks great! Will deploy my next project on here and see how good it is :)

• by nephanth on 2/6/23, 12:03 AM

  Where does the money come from?