No questions, just want to say Thank you. I see a great need for such service, planning to use some soon. Never heard about Pikapods before.

Maybe there will be good demand for simple db like SQLite. Just a suggesion.

Goodluck

Some apps already use SQLite as storage. In addition we run shared Postgres and Mariadb.

Why Malta?

Any benefits to being incorporated/hosted there?

Pros/Cons?

Are you planning on including resource intensive media/other apps like Plex, Emby, Jellyfin, Sonarr, Radarr etc as well?

Also, I HIGHLY doubt you're "surprised" to see this posted here and elsewhere (like on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/ulm395/pikapods...) as this all appears engineered / deliberate with your involvement - I mean, your response is literally identical - which is fine and all, but transparency is likely a better approach.

Good hustle though.

Yeah, English speaking and inside the EU are some pros. (European myself)

I’m trying to stay away from apps with large piracy/abuse potential for now. Later they may go on a dedicated server in a friendly country like Netherlands.

Plans to allow 3-4 apps on one pod? Something that literally is by just one person? Maybe something that hosts notes server, contacts, calendar etc?

One pod maps to one public URL and one Docker image. So would be hard to change the setup like this.

I have some questions:

If I understood correctly, this service only allows managed hosting from a curated list of services/apps? I assume that I cannot run my own docker containers. There are a lot of Run Your Own links/text, which made me think first that I could run my own, but instead it seems that I can choose what can be run for me.

Assuming this is OCI based, how are the containers isolated? Is it with cgroups and namespaces (because of rootless), but still sharing the kernel or are users placed inside separate VMs?

What about storage/disk/volume encryption? If I get allocated 10GB of data from the disk, does it have readable, but deleted data from a previous user? How is my data secured on the disk?

I currently have a usage pattern with Jitsi, which I host when I need to have a meeting. I use it a few hours a week and a minute/hour based cloud pricing from many providers are ideal for this. It is relatively cheap to launch even a beefy instance for only a couple of hours at a time.

I didn't see Jitsi on the list, but also the pricing is only listed as monthly. Is there more granular pricing?

What about more closed source software containers, like game servers? I didn't see those on the list. I'm pretty sure Minecraft, Valheim, Satisfactory etc. servers would bring more customers and make the service more popular.

What about managed databases?

I also saw Gitea, but not Gitlab.

Your offering seems to target somewhat similar audience to Linode's Marketplace. Linode calls them "one click apps": https://www.linode.com/marketplace/

Your pricing seems cheaper than Linode's, but is there any other advantage to use your service over theirs? Linode can even manage and configure DNS settings for custom domains automatically for you for their one click apps.

I like your website and it works well on mobile. This service also seems at glance like a great idea. I wish there was a bit more information to help me understand what this service does exactly and how it differs from the competition.

> sharing the kernel or are users placed inside separate VMs?

The isolation is with users and SELinux. There are no VMs as those are pretty heavy.

> the pricing is only listed as monthly. Is there more granular pricing?

Pricing is with hourly granularity, but shown as monthly for simplicity.

> What about storage/disk/volume encryption?

We run only bare-metal servers, so this is less of a concern unless you expect the whole server to be stolen. Data still needs to be accessible all the time.

> What about managed databases?

It's more focused on end users, rather than devs. So trying not to go overboard with very technical apps.

> I also saw Gitea, but not Gitlab. > What about more closed source software containers, like game servers?

Still many apps to be added. I also try not to compete with hosting offered by FOSS authors, unless they push other options themselves. Added a note on Gitlab on our feedback tracker: https://feedback.pikapods.com/

> Your pricing seems cheaper than Linode's, but is there any other advantage to use your service over theirs?

Linode seems to use VMs and asks you to make an install script. So it will be heavier than simple containers I use.

Hope I covered a few questions. There was a lot in this comment...

>> What about storage/disk/volume encryption?

> We run only bare-metal servers, so this is less of a concern unless you expect the whole server to be stolen. Data still needs to be accessible all the time.

So, when I delete a file and it is marked as deleted in the file system and it becomes empty space, then when this same space gets allocated for someone else, they can just read my file from the allocated empty space. This doesn't require the server to be stolen or physical access, just someone else reusing the same physical/bare-metal hardware after me. Encrypting files/volumes/storage per user solves this problem. Leaving it unencrypted exposes my data to all other users of the system.

Here is some ideas on how Google handles this: https://cloud.google.com/docs/security/encryption/default-en...

I hope you re-consider encrypting user data.

> Leaving it unencrypted exposes my data to all other users of the system.

This would be an issue if we would offer access to block devices. That’s not the case. The pod can only see the files and not read at the block level. Else every shared hosting setup would have this issue.

I’ll still look into it and see if there is any action needed. And the potential overhead for encrypting only the mounted user files. My feeling is that it’s pretty doable.

This is very interesting. However, I recommend that you keep the pricing constant and cap the resource usage at your end. A lot of semi-technical folks would understand the value of owning data and using open source application but the "fuzziness" around pricing would put them off.

This looks great, I'll try it as soon as I get home. One question before I try, say I want to use FileRun or Photoprism but mount an S3 bucket for the storage, do we have enough configurability to accomplish that?

Probably yes, so just try it! If any user-configurable env var is missing, I'll add it right away. PhotoPrism already has a LOT of configurable env vars and I don't recall seeing something about S3 there. So it may be inside the app.

Sorry, rather than env vars, it was more about being able to mount it as a filesystem, since I know Filerun at least tell you to do that - https://feedback.filerun.com/en/communities/1/topics/1166-aw...

If it’s not from within the app, then I’m afraid it’s not possible with the current setup. Also not sure if this would be stable enough. I believe PhotoPrism allows mounting webdav from within the app and import pictures from there.

Any detailed privacy information? e.g storage encryption and access, system credentials etc. Why do some apps require billing information for trial?

There is a boiler plate privacy page, but not with those technical details yet.

First, storage isn’t encrypted and I can’t think of threat scenarios that require it, since we only use bare metal servers and control the drives. Wouldn’t add much benefit at the cost of higher CPU usage.

For your account, you can enable TOTP 2FA from Account > Password/2FA.

For our production servers, any admin access needs a hardware Yubikey.

If you control the drives, what will you do when old drives are cycled out? Will you just dump them in a bin for a letter agency to come and harvest my cat photos?

IMO, FDE is easy enough to do, even if the users never get to do it themselves. It sort of protects the users from leaking their data in the event that a company goes out of business or someone breaks in to steal hardware.

Usually overwrite the data a few times before decommissioning the server.

I’ll do some testing for the next server to see how much overhead FDE would add.

Cool idea. Can you comment on who the owner of the actual server hardware is and on the locations of those?

We rent from our regular colo partners and sometimes buy our own drives, if it helps lower the price. It will eventually show the DC location as tooltip on the region. For the EU it's Hetzner, for US it's INAP and Cogent DCs near Boston, for Asia it will be Leaseweb.