jsamuel

Less Bits | Bellingham, WA | Full Time | REMOTE | L2/L3 Linux support, devops, marketing, more

Less Bits is building a company of thoughtful people while reinventing the hosting industry. We're looking for long-term employees. We raised an angel round years ago, we're now growing on revenue and not seeking funding.

Our main products include:

- ServerPilot: securely run fast WordPress and PHP apps on cloud servers.

- HostLaunch: easily run your own hosting company on DigitalOcean, ServerPilot, and Stripe.

- HeatShield (launching soon): a WordPress WAF leveraging a local ModSecurity/Golang agent.

We're growing and interviewing for many positions. Our most critical needs at the moment are:

- L2/L3 support: Linux, OS fundamentals, debugging, fast learner, highly professional. Hosting experience a plus.

- DevOps: All of the above + Python and devops experience. 25-50% time as L2/L3 support.

Apply through https://lessbits.com/careers/ or email careers@lessbits.com. Thanks!

In markets such as hosting where differentiation is largely about quality of support, brand, and marketing, there are many different reasons why customers choose their hosting company. Some people will stay with their existing host. Many others, both existing and new customers entering the market, will seek out new solutions or be attracted to a different company for varied reasons (poor support experience with existing provider, recommendation of a friend, strong marketing attracted them, identified more closely with the brand values, etc.).

I'm not sure but it may be you're looking for an explanation of why consumers choose one product over others when the consumer doesn't have the full knowledge or information to make an ideal decision (regardless of whether they often believe they do). Brand and marketing have a huge impact in those cases, tied in with the values of the customer base driving who they trust and want to do business with.

There's a huge market of people who want to purchase managed hosting, not be responsible for their own servers. Think of the customers (such as WordPress developers) of any traditional hosting company like DreamHost.

The purpose of HostLaunch is to make it extremely easy to start your own managed hosting business to sell web hosting services in that same market.

If you have even a little experience with Linux or are looking to learn, we've built https://hostlaunch.io/ to make it very easy to start a managed cloud hosting company.

Just drop in your DigitalOcean, ServerPilot, SendGrid, and Stripe API keys, set your prices, and you've got a hosting company.

ServerPilot (https://serverpilot.io/) --- Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6733631

Our Show HN post didn't get much attention, but we also didn't have our marketing hopes set on that. We did turn into a successful startup, not in terms of raising money but instead in terms of growing off of revenue.

ServerPilot | Tucson, Arizona | Phoenix, Arizona | Full-Time | ONSITE

We’re a growing server management startup that makes it easy to use DigitalOcean and other cloud providers for hosting websites.

In Tucson, we’re hiring a Linux Systems Engineer.

https://angel.co/serverpilot/jobs/420427-linux-systems-engin...

In Phoenix, we’re hiring a Technical Account Manager:

https://angel.co/serverpilot/jobs/415600-technical-account-m...

Apply through AngelList or email jobs at serverpilot.io.

It's only necessary for older servers (e.g. Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04) where people haven't done this already.

Confirmed that LightSail works with ServerPilot (https://serverpilot.io/).

LightSail's default firewall opens ports 22 (SSH) and 80 (HTTP) but has 443 (HTTPS) closed. That seems like a terrible default for making a developer-friendly service. Hopefully they fix that and open 443 by default. Otherwise, a lot of wasted time is going to be spent by developers who have configured SSL on their sites and don't know why it isn't working.

LightSail feels very similar to DreamCompute that DreamHost launched, including the approach of only allowing SSH public key auth without any option of using password auth. So, they're intentionally leaving out some users with that approach.

At ServerPilot, we decided early on not to support HHVM for similar reasons: we could see PHP 7 was going to offer the same performance benefits without the pain, breakage, and downtime of HHVM.

Early on, before PHP 7 was released, we had to explain this to many of our users who use ServerPilot to host WordPress, Magento, Laravel, and other PHP apps. They often thought there was no downside or risk with HHVM, it was as simple as dropping it in as a replacement. Nowadays, with the hype around HHVM dying down, we don't get requests for HHVM support much anymore.

For a huge company like Facebook, HHVM makes a lot of sense. And the existence of HHVM really sped up the PHP 7 development efforts and provided a great benchmark for how fast PHP 7 could be. So, the PHP community should be very grateful to Facebook for that even if HHVM isn't the future of PHP.

Though ServerPilot focuses more on ongoing server management (e.g. updates, control panel, monitoring, support) for DigitalOcean servers rather than one-click installers, there is now a one-click WordPress installer.

https://serverpilot.io/blog/2015/07/22/one-click-wordpress-a...

I wonder if people really do use ownCloud on shared hosting

DigitalOcean and other VPS providers are popular for hosting ownCloud.

Congrats to the PHP team. We're quite happy to see PHP 5.3 fully EOL'd recently and 5.6 now released. In trying to do our part to encourage adoption, we've already added support for 5.6 to ServerPilot (https://serverpilot.io/).

Given how many people are uninspired and undirected in their lives, it's a wonderful privilege to have something you know you want to do. On top of that, it's amazing to be in a position where you can make it happen.

I've got a lot of similarities with your story.

I dropped out of EE in 1997 when I was 18. A few years later, in 2003, I was about to begin studying writing and literature when I realized that my hobby-become-job, programming, was what I was truly passionate about.

At first, I tinkered with useless online courses (they were much more useless ten years ago). I finally put life plans in motion so that I could study CS at a university. I began studying CS in 2006 with the goal of becoming a security expert. I got my undergrad degree in CS when I was 30.

While an undergrad, I got involved with research and decided to go to grad school. To give me more experience, meet more people in my field, and generally improve grad school options, I took an extra year doing research in a CS department before applying to grad programs. In that time I published a research paper with people I'd admired from before I went back to school. I got my choice of top research programs and went to grad school in 2010.

In 2012, I realized academia wasn't for me and had a startup idea I wanted to pursue. Now, two years and a huge amount of learning and new experiences later, I've got a quickly growing startup with amazing people on our team. I no longer write much code, but I love my new challenges every day.

You don't know what you'll end up doing, but if you know you want to study CS, then start as soon as you can. Life's too short to delay doing what you know you should do.

Interesting, I didn't realize that Ajenti charges for commercial licensing of their web hosting addon.

http://ajenti.org/licensing

It's on github separately but without a license: https://github.com/Eugeny/ajenti-v

I love how they narrowed their focus to barbershops. One of the hardest parts of many startups is finding and staying focused on the right niche.

The need among PHP developers for a service that also does ongoing server management is why we built ServerPilot (https://serverpilot.io/).

While Forge is an advanced deployment tool similar to PuPHPet (https://puphpet.com/), ServerPilot is a modern alternative to cPanel for developers using their own servers.

Hi. Thanks for your feedback. We need to improve the site to make these things clearer.

We save you time by configuring servers initially, doing reconfiguration tasks for you, setting up and handling monitoring (e.g. of disk space, cpu, application errors), and taking care of steps that many developers forget. In general, you can take a fresh server, connect it to ServerPilot, do "create an app" through our interface, and then have a production-ready server configured for running your app.

On new servers, ServerPilot installs and configures necessary services for running your apps (nginx, apache, php, mysql), configures a firewall, automates package updates, sets up monitoring, and does a handful of other things like ensuring the system clock is updated and stays updated.

After initial server setup, we provide a web interface and APIs to create and manage apps and databases (which behind the scenes means we reconfigure services), make it easy to deploy SSL certs, and provide ways to monitor your servers and apps.

We've got many more features coming. So, if there's something that you'd like to see us do that we don't do currently, please let us know.

Hi, founder here. We're trying to change the way developers use and manage cloud servers. We'd love any feedback, questions, or feature requests you have.

Thank you!

Thanks, Juan. PuPHPet is great. We should talk about ways for PuPHPet and ServerPilot to work together.

I definitely understand your security concerns. My background is actually in security research. The architecture we're implementing will prevent arbitrary code execution on your servers if we were compromised by ensuring only signed code is executed. And, of course, code signing will be done offline.

Relatedly, here's some of my research on creating software update and deployment systems that are resilient to compromise:

https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jsamuel/papers/survivable-key...

Thanks for signing up. We plan to keep the basic app and server management free. What you see in the current private beta will all remain free.

Pricing is a hard question to answer before we're ready to commit to it. At the moment, we're focused on learning what people need and continuing to improve our free tier. Definitely let us know (support@freedomcp.com) if there is specific functionality you'd like to see.

Thanks for testing us out and for the positive words.

We don't do any additional server hardening at the moment. Our focus on security right now is primarily on the security of our software and how we configure services. Depending on demand, we'll consider how soon these additional features are added.

We'll be adding more documentation soon and that will include architecture and security docs that explain exactly how FreedomCP works and what gets installed. Some of those details are in flux as we're still early in development. Feel free to email support@freedomcp.com with specific questions until we have more documentation.

Also, we're looking for people passionate about both server management and security. If anyone's interested, check out our jobs page at https://angel.co/freedomcp/jobs

Hi, cofounder here. It's not open source. The FreedomCP agent that runs on your servers is written in Python and can be audited but most of the code resides on our side as it's a hosted service.

If being a good developer was only related to technical skills and background, hiring would sure be a lot easier.

One of the best developers I know was an English major. He's even more amazing as a leader. He now leads a large team of engineers and I hope to someday get the chance to work with him again.