My main problem is that the clients themselves should be able to self-host their product, without my intervention, and without them having any technical knowledge.

I am now doing this by teaching the clients how to use DigitalOcean + cloud-init to create a new server that automatically installs the software required: https://docs.usertrack.net/dedicated-usertrack-server

In a perfect world, all those steps mentioned in the link above (create droplet, copy userTrack cloud-init code, add domain, generate certificate) would be done through a single button click by the client, on any hosting platform they would chose.

All the steps listed on the url you shared can be automated and the platform can already do this. However, there are two issues: 1) Automated service is only available for DigitalOcean (DO) right now, so your client will have to choose DO as their infra provider. 2) DO does not offer granular OAuth permissions. In order to provision the droplet and modify the DNS records in the DO panel, the client has to authorize 'write' access. We do not persist the oauth token but for clients who are using their DO account for other purposes it can be a deal breaker.

Also, is it possible for your app 'usertrack' to read the license key from the environment variable?

Let me know if you would like to test this out. The service is in private beta at the moment.

-- The client will have to use the DO oauth to login, provide their ssh public key and the domain name. Everything else will be take care of by the app. It takes roughly 8-12 minutes to complete the deployment.

I talked to people at DO, and there seems to be no current way to fully automate this process, because, as you said, the client needs to give access to create a droplet on his account.

From what they said, the only way to do that is if they create a DigitalOcean account, go to their settings and create an API token that they can share with me.

It would have been awesome if it was possible for me to send them a link with all the details needed (marketplace image to be used, cloud-init script, etc.), and when they click that link they get sent to a DO registration page, when they create the DO account they would also instantly have that droplet created for them.

As I mentioned before, I already provide a semi-automate way to deploy using cloud-init, the main drawback is that the user still has to manually copy that cloud-init script, which is not too complicated, but it's an extra step.

> provide their ssh public key A non-techincal unforunately user has no idea what a SSH key is. Does it also work with password login?

About your service, I don't understand exactly what it provides and how it would help with my use-case. I checked out your site ( https://deploybob.com/ ), but it doesn't say much.

All the features listed seem to be the same as the DO droplet creation using a marketplace image or cloud-init.