Like the idea! But for me I do not see the a benefit over a simple FTP enabled webserver + cloudflare apart from the form submissions. Would you elaborate on that, what makes it worth 5$/month?
* Pricing hint:
- Go either more expensive with the monthly plan, or cheaper with the yearly. For only 5% off I would not go for the yearly commitment.
- Display your yearly price also as 4.74$ & 14.24$ per month instead of the big yearly sum as the big number requires me as customer to pull out my calculator to see the actual saving
- Add Call to actions to the pricing boxes e.g. "Signup now for Business plan", even it just redirects to the signup page, it has less friction for me as customer
* Other website feedback:
- I don't find a imprint. If you control my website, I would like to know who you are.
- I assume you are not a native english speaker (me neither), as some sentences sound a bit weird on the site. Maybe get a proofreader. (I do that for my projects and it increases the sites a lot :D)
- Especially for the target group you mentioned I think the automatic rollback is a good selling argument. As if you only use e.g. FTP and overwrite files, everyone knows that feeling of accidentally overwritten a wrong file or with an old version.
- For being GDPR compliant your privacy policy is not enough
- Unlimited Bandwidth could be a bad idea as some high traffic sites could cost you a lot
- A SLA would be nice to have, like "99.9% uptime" to know you are trustworthy and my site will not be down for month
* Feature ideas:
- Automatically add lazy loading for images
I like what you're doing but I have to admit that I am finding a lot of the front page copy to be somewhat awkward:
"Clodui automatically minifies all your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, then served in compressed gzip format to further reduce the file size. All the requests served over HTTP/2, which further boosts your website speed."
would be much easier to read if it were reworded like so:
"Clodui automatically minifies all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. These minified files are then compressed and served over HTTP/2, which further boosts your websites speed."
If you want help cleaning up more of it, contact me at my username @ gmail.
Worth noting that firebase (Google) provides a similar service. It's entirely free to host static websites. Definitely ends up on a cdn and definitely uses static compression. Ssl certs even get auto handled.
Hi Cvrajeesh, congrats on launching! It's a big achievement to get your project out the door and in customer's hands.
We launched a very similar service (fast.io) a few months ago and have found some good interest in the product. Unfortunately, however, there are many other good solutions for simple deployments and performant static hosting. My question for you would be, what are you doing that solves your customer's problem so much better than competitors that they'd be willing to put their mission-critical website on your (unproven) service over anyone else's?
For these simple use-cases (the ones you appear to be targeting) most users just aren't willing to pay. The more sophisticated users who are running businesses (and would pay) often need more features and greater control over their hosting solution - features that will take you a long time to build out and prove in the market.
As such, we're working on a product pivot that's educated by the insights we've gained through our initial launch. We don't want to go head-on with other products that are, quite frankly, doing a great job in this market already. I'll be really curious to see/hear if you encounter similar challenges and how you navigate them.
A few nitpicks:
- In the ToS there's no mention of the company I'm making the agreement with
- I'd appreciate an about page about who's behind this, but my first point kinda explains it :)
- What CDN are you using? Have you built your own?
Just curious: how is "clodui" pronounced?
At first I read Cloud UI, but after pausing a little I realized it was not Cloud UI.
I mention this because I think names matter for word-of-mouth recommendation. In many interviews, Morgan Freeman would recount that The Shawshank Redemption bombed at the box-office because back in the day word-of-mouth was still dominant way of getting movie recommendations, and people couldn't say or remember the word "Shawshank".
Woof, expensive. This might be worth it if there's live support included and a really easy control panel, but otherwise a similar setup is $60/year.
The image resizing and optimization is a good sell, but it's dramatically more expensive to have it when under the hood it's a relatively cheap feature aside from initial build out, and it's available in basic form for free on places like Netlify.
Wanted to read about forms in your docs. Page does not exist : https://www.clodui.com/form/add-form
Looks interesting, the minification looks like a pretty good selling point.
One thing I noticed is the slow connection from Australia, it seems your CDN is limited to Europe and America.
Would be nice to know more about the CDN, because after all just two POPs makes a very simple CDN, but a CDN isn't just two POPs!
aren't a lot of these things already handled by web servers and browsers? (caching. gzip compression, etc...)
Wow !! This is a great piece of work. Hassle-free hosting and automatic optimization
that's just cloudflare. they are doing all of those.
Really cool idea ! :)
Looks like Netlify
Your app seems geared toward users who are not very technical. I think your pricing structure is too sophisticated. I would include everything in the free plan and the tiers would only be bandwidth usage and form submissions. No one is going to upgrade for robots.txt file support. Even the 30 deploys a month is a lot but it’s psychologically going to feel limiting and decrease signups. They’re gonna upgrade because they need to capture more forms not because of deploy count, that’s just going to upset people. That’s why Netlify has unlimited everything but if you want to capture forms or any other server side processing, you pay. That’s the biggest value add for these services imo.