By Kenton Varda - 22 Apr 2014
It’s been nearly a month since Sandstorm launched, and we’ve been busy. Here’s what’s new!
When Sandstorm launched, some people thought it odd that our message of freedom from other people’s servers was followed by an invitation to use ours. To clear the air a bit, we’ve now made it ridiculously easy to install your own Sandstorm server on your very own Linux machine:
curl https://install.sandstorm.io | bash
Follow the on-screen directions and you’ll be up and running in seconds. No need to build code nor edit config files. In fact, your Sandstorm installation will even (if you choose) automatically keep itself updated, so you never have to deal with it again. (Of course, you can still get the full source code on Github if you prefer.)
Of course, not everybody has a Linux server lying around, or wants their cloud apps hosted off their home internet connection, or wants to pay the typical $50/mo for a cloud VM instance powerful enough to run Sandstorm well. That’s why we also want to offer managed instances that don’t require any of that.
To be clear: when you use our server, you are still in control. You can upload any app you want. We do not serve ads, and we will not mine your data. We let you move your data from our servers to your own at any time. It’s like having your own VM on AWS except without the config files and the updating and the security issues.
Eventually, we plan to charge a small fee for managed instances as a way to cover our upstream hosting costs and fund development. But, for our early alpha testers, the service is free.
Speaking of using our servers…
Despite the limited scope of our initial announcement, we ended up with an order of magnitude more people on our waiting list than we anticipated. If you signed up and haven’t received an invite – alas, that’s most of you – I apologize!
We have not yet implemented the ability for Sandstorm to scale to multiple machines. However, we recently increased the capacity of our main machine such that we should be able to invite a lot more people, and we’ll get to work on multi-machine scaling soon. Be sure to get on the mailing list if you want an invite – or just want to stay updated.
Some awesome contributors have written/ported a few new Sandstorm apps:
Install these and other apps to your Sandstorm instance from the app list.
Porting apps is still a somewhat weird and ad hoc process. Usually the code doesn’t need to change much, but figuring out the app’s dependencies for packaging purposes takes some sleuthing. We’re working on better tools which will make this process much easier; stay tuned.