By Kenton Varda - 17 Nov 2016
Sandstorm is about making it easy to run a personal server. But we also offer Sandstorm Oasis, a service which runs your Sandstorm server for you.
Contradiction?
Actually, no: Even if you run your own server, Oasis benefits you. Oasis is important because it makes it possible for anyone to use Sandstorm’s library of open source apps, even if they really don’t want to run their own server. A larger audience means that more and better apps will become available. Indeed, after we launched Oasis last year, the rate of new apps becoming available on Sandstorm spiked.
That benefits self-hosters, because those same apps can be used on your private server, too.
In fact, we at Sandstorm don’t necessarily think “the cloud” is a bad idea. What we believe is that you should have the freedom to choose what makes sense for you. But that choice is moot if the particular app you need to use is only available in the cloud – we need the same apps to be available everywhere.
Oasis has now been running reliably for over a year. The Sandstorm team uses Oasis every day to get our own work done. I am composing this blog post in Etherpad, while organizing my task list in Wekan, chatting with teammates in Rocket.Chat, and syncing files with Davros.
Here are just some of the things we’ve changed since Oasis was launched:
We’ve so far kept Oasis labeled “beta”, mostly because, as engineers, we always feel like there’s so much more to do. But, that will always be true – no good software project is ever “done”. With Oasis being used for so much real work, the time has come to remove the “beta” label.
Oasis will officially emerge from beta on November 27. We wanted to give advance notice of this change because it affects our paying users: we will no longer be waiving your subscription fee as we have during the beta period. For backers of our Indiegogo campaign who opted for free hosting as a perk, the timer on your service will start now (hey, you got an extra free year!). For the rest, your next monthly invoice will be charged from your credit card. Your subscription payments help support further development of Sandstorm and packaging more apps. Thank you for your support!