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Ploi - Deploy tool feedback wanted

24

Comments

  • @Matt247 said:

    @Cannonb4lls said:
    Not yet, but I am interested, could you tell me the benefits?

    Running apache + nginx as a reverse proxy give user ability to use .htaccess for URL rewrite without need to convert to nginx configuration, this is very useful feature.

    Ah, will note this to our TODO list and read myself into this material :)

    Thanked by 1Matt247
  • Awmusic12635Awmusic12635 Member, Host Rep

    Cannonb4lls said: I was kind of thinking the same, but could you elaborate a bit more on breaking down?

    I just meant where you listed all the features for a specific plan. List less of them. There is just way too much listed there.

  • @Cannonb4lls said:

    @DanSummer said:

    @Cannonb4lls said:

    @DanSummer said:

    Cannonb4lls said: Good suggestion, when its on the installation progress you cannot delete it, but I will note this to our TODO list as this is required. After installation you can go to the META tab and find all specific information about your server as well as a delete button.

    Then I've missed the opportunity to test this. What happened is this:
    I provisioned two identical vps servers, wanted to run some test with your system on one and runcloud on the other.... inserted the wrong server IP into your system and it has been attempting to install on the server with no luck for over 10 hours now.

    it would keep trying to install on the wrong server forever.

    Haha, it looks like its installing but it actually isn't, it aborted installation and notified me what is going on. Can I remove it so you can test again?

    Sure! Please proceed. Regarding features, how does your pro option compare to runcloud pro version (https://runcloud.io/pricing.html) in terms of features?

    I see they write every feature they have in that table, if I do that the list would be as long as theirs actually.

    As far as I can see if you compare the pro versions, we offer extra;

    • Automatic MySQL dropbox backup (to your own dropbox)
    • Zero Time Deployment

    There might even be more, but I can't think of them right now.

    Good point! I'll advise you write it out too (add a mouseover/ popup for explanation where things could use some explaining).

    Runcloud has their own backup which cost extra. I think is smart to use dropbox or google drive which most people already have access to.

    I love Runcloud but come to think of it, I loved serverpilot until a few weeks back :) I'll happily sign up for your pro account and drop serverpilot from my portfolio so I'll have runcloud and ploi... but first, I need to get your script running on the server!

  • Cannonb4llsCannonb4lls Member
    edited July 2018

    Good suggestion @DanSummer, the popups are a great idea to elaborate on some features and functions.

    I did the backup thing on purpose this way, as you said people usually have these providers as storage so it benefits both of us. (Google Drive implementation still has to come though)

    If you create a empty Ubuntu 16.04/18.04 server with your favorite vendor and follow installation process correctly it should be fine then. The installation of a custom VPS is fairly easy really.

  • @Cannonb4lls said:
    Previous comments made me think about the pricing part so I refactored a bit more to clarify exactly what Ploi has, there is more which I will add later but this gives a huge indication already:

    https://ploi.io/pricing

    Let me know what you think!

    Bad move my friend, bad move! LOL

  • You went and took away dropbox auto backup from the basic plan. wth? :)
    was that a mistake?

  • @DanSummer said:

    @Cannonb4lls said:
    Previous comments made me think about the pricing part so I refactored a bit more to clarify exactly what Ploi has, there is more which I will add later but this gives a huge indication already:

    https://ploi.io/pricing

    Let me know what you think!

    Bad move my friend, bad move! LOL

    Could you elaborate?

    @DanSummer said:
    You went and took away dropbox auto backup from the basic plan. wth? :)
    was that a mistake?

    Yes a design mistake which I discovered when refactoring.

  • Cannonb4lls said: Could you elaborate?

    dropbox auto backup is not available for the $5/5 servers plan. It was there before you updated that page.

  • williewillie Member

    What does zero time deployment mean? How long does deployment take without it?

    How about irc notification along with discord and slack?

    Re:

    Ploi is a VPS management tool where you can provision servers in with DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, Scaleway or a VPS by your favorite vendor (Ubuntu 18.04).

    can that info be put on the site? What do you mean by "VPS by your favorite vendor": does the VPS have to run Ubuntu 18.04? Can it be any VPS, i.e. I upload an ssh private key so Ploi can install stuff on the server?

    I guess this is intended as site feedback (i.e. site should clarify the above things) rather than sales-type questions.

    Does the per-server pricing mean per VPS or per hardware node? Like if I have a dedi and want to run 50 VPS on it do I need the unlimited plan? Can the program deploy and manage VPS on a bare metal node? I've used proxmox a little but mostly don't virtualize at all at the moment.

    It would be nice if there was a documentation page with detailed explanation of all the features, screen shots etc., accessible without signing up.

    Overall it seems like a relatively upscale product, which is a perfectly fine thing, even if LET is more of a DIY crowd trying to do things on the cheap.

  • I've never used something like this before but I'm intrigued, nice work :)

    I'm testing Ploi out as I type this, just waiting for the initial process to finish.

    Thanked by 1Cannonb4lls
  • Really seems like you're just being overly negative around this.

    @willie said:
    What does zero time deployment mean?

    Instant deployment if I had to guess...

    How long does deployment take without it?

    Not instantly?

    How about irc notification along with discord and slack?

    lol

    can that info be put on the site? What do you mean by "VPS by your favorite vendor": does the VPS have to run Ubuntu 18.04?

    VPS by your favourite vendor means any vendor running Ubuntu 18. You may run it on 14, 16 or 18 but 18 is officially supported.

    Can it be any VPS, i.e. I upload an ssh private key so Ploi can install stuff on the server?

    Honestly, it feels like I've quoted a child.

    LET is more of a DIY crowd trying to do things on the cheap.

    Speak for yourself.

  • williewillie Member
    edited July 2018

    I wasn't trying to be negative. Do you know how Ploi sets up the VPS? I.e. do I upload an ssh key to Ploi which Ploi then uses? Or is it some other way? The mention of specific providers like DO made it sound like Ploi might depend on provider API's. Yes it's understood that the VPS has to run Ubuntu version whatever.

    Speak for yourself.

    Well I wasn't aware that products like this even existed. I use some ansible playbooks for deployment and (hypothetically) Nagios on remote VPSes for monitoring, but I can see the attraction of having centralized monitoring, logging, a browser GUI, maybe a SIEM? Etc. LET has traditionally been mostly about self-hosting on raw VPS, so Ploi is kind of unusual for here. I certainly wish it the best.

  • @Cannonb4lls said:

    If you create a empty Ubuntu 16.04/18.04 server with your favorite vendor and follow installation process correctly it should be fine then. The installation of a custom VPS is fairly easy really.

    Thanks! It worked. Great potential.
    I think I managed to break a thing or two and now ploi can't see the server. That's good though since it's reversible:)

    I'll pm you on what went wrong.

    Looking good!

  • @DanSummer said:

    Cannonb4lls said: Could you elaborate?

    dropbox auto backup is not available for the $5/5 servers plan. It was there before you updated that page.

    I meant could you elaborate on your previous comment: "Bad move my friend, bad move! LOL".

    The dropbox plan was always ment to be available from Pro plan but I made a mistake in the pricing tables, as I said before.

    @PowerNode said:
    I've never used something like this before but I'm intrigued, nice work :)

    I'm testing Ploi out as I type this, just waiting for the initial process to finish.

    Nice, if you have any feedback let me know please :)

    @DanSummer said:

    @Cannonb4lls said:

    If you create a empty Ubuntu 16.04/18.04 server with your favorite vendor and follow installation process correctly it should be fine then. The installation of a custom VPS is fairly easy really.

    Thanks! It worked. Great potential.
    I think I managed to break a thing or two and now ploi can't see the server. That's good though since it's reversible:)

    I'll pm you on what went wrong.

    Looking good!

    I will await your PM, thanks!

    @willie

    I'll reply this way to not make this post too big and unreadable. I get where you are coming from, you want more detailed explanation about the work-process of Ploi. I will note this in our TODO list and have a small meeting with the team how we can solve this properly :)

  • Cannonb4lls said: I meant could you elaborate on your previous comment: "Bad move my friend, bad move! LOL".

    The dropbox plan was always ment to be available from Pro plan but I made a mistake in the pricing tables, as I said before.

    That comment was about the update you made on the price page removing dropbox feature from the basic account.

    Got your explanation now.

  • @DanSummer said:

    Cannonb4lls said: I meant could you elaborate on your previous comment: "Bad move my friend, bad move! LOL".

    The dropbox plan was always ment to be available from Pro plan but I made a mistake in the pricing tables, as I said before.

    That comment was about the update you made on the price page removing dropbox feature from the basic account.

    Got your explanation now.

    Yes :) We talked on the live chat as well, thank you for your feedback once again.

    If anyone else has anything, please let me know!

  • williewillie Member

    Cannonb4lls said: I get where you are coming from, you want more detailed explanation about the work-process of Ploi. I will note this in our TODO list and have a small meeting with the team how we can solve this properly :)

    Thanks ;). Actually it will make the product more serious if it has real documentation (detailed and professionally edited) though that is a pretty big project. https://docs.ansible.com/ is an example at a much larger scale.

  • @willie

    There's no reason for a customer to know how a product works. Ploi may or may not use Ansible/Puppet/Chef (take your pick) in the backend.

    This is what deployment tools like Ploi and Serverpilot work. It's easier to be hands off sometimes and let a product do the configuration for you.

    You said you deploy Nagios (or its agents?) for monitoring. Afaik, the process is fairly straightforward as compared to deploying applications which products like Ploi support out of the box, and as far as I know, clustered WordPress deployments are in the pipeline for Ploi, which again, is a fairly complex process where you have to keep in mind load balancers, mysql clusters, and caches, depending on how the customer wants these.

    Then again, you may be part of a DIY crowd but I prefer a tool for doing this for me so that I can avoid the human errors and save the time I would've spent fixing those.

    I wasn't trying to be negative. Do you know how Ploi sets up the VPS? I.e. do I upload an ssh key to Ploi which Ploi then uses? Or is it some other way? The mention of specific providers like DO made it sound like Ploi might depend on provider API's. Yes it's understood that the VPS has to run Ubuntu version whatever.

    That doesn't make sense. If you're uploading ssh keys, why would they even need the API?

    You may not have purposefully tried by negative but its a pita when someone takes the time out to make a dedicated support threat to help people answer questions about his product and gets bombarded with crap like this.

  • williewillie Member
    edited July 2018

    varunchopra said: That doesn't make sense. If you're uploading ssh keys, why would they even need the API?

    The first thought when I saw specific hosts mentioned was that it used an API. Then I found out it could manage Ubuntu instances on other hosts, so ssh came to mind. So I'm asking whether ssh is the mechanism. That's something a customer definitely has to know in order to use the system.

    I'm not trying to slag on it. It's a cool idea and if it's helping you with your own deployments that's great. I haven't felt so far that I needed something like that myself, but I can see how it can make things simpler.

    What I mean by upscale is this: if I'm running a bunch of $10/m or $20/m DO instances then the $1/month per server for Ploi isn't bad at all. And those are considered budget services compared with AWS. But the maximum allowed price for a VPS offer on LET is $7/month and the most popular ones, possibly the majority of the ones actually sold, are under $2/month ($10-$20/year annual plans). The cost of Ploi gets to be a significant chunk of the server expenditures for those and seems likely to hit some resistance. In my case I have a bunch of LES-style NAT VPS which are $2-$4 per YEAR, so Ploi is not cost effective at all, unless I have 100s of them and get the unlimited plan. On the other hand I think the pricing is quite reasonable considering the work going into developing and operating it, so I don't claim that it should be cheaper.

    That's why I think LET is probably not an ideal audience for this product. There are some users such as yourself who are in the target market but many (most?) of us are further down on the food chain.

    @Cannonb4lls : it might be worthwhile to offer a reseller option, so VPS hosts could offer it to their clients as an add-on. Users could then just check a box if they want to buy it, when they order their VPS or afterwards.

    varunchopra said: dedicated support threa[d]

    It's not a support thread, it's a feedback thread (look at the thread title), and I gave some feedback.

  • @willie said:
    @Cannonb4lls : it might be worthwhile to offer a reseller option, so VPS hosts could offer it to their clients as an add-on. Users could then just check a box if they want to buy it, when they order their VPS or afterwards.

    Yes, I had the same idea to do this. Anyone have some VPS hosts that they recommend so I can contact those?

  • Or easier than reseller and better for your reputation (given all of the many many many VPS provider flame outs around here), pick 3 or 4 outstanding, longstanding providers at multiple price points ie buyvm, ramnode, hetzner, digital ocean and refer your clients to them. At the minimum you know you would have stable providers and generate some referral fees. Best of all your reputation won't get tarnished by the summer host flame out of the month. Building a terrific reputation for stability is beneficial in the long run. Managing resellers that are the third or forth provider in line from the bare metal owner doesn't seem fruitful to me.

  • williewillie Member

    Cannonb4lls said:

    Yes, I had the same idea to do this. Anyone have some VPS hosts that they recommend so I can contact those?

    I'd suggest implementing the feature including any needed WHMCS integration, then announcing it here, inviting beta test participants.

    At the other end of things you could possibly resell some hosting services, i.e. have some controls in Ploi to spin up new instances on Linode/DO/Hetzner etc., i.e. hourly providers with API's. Maybe monthly ones too, which would widen it to the usual LET providers. I'm not sure how that would work in terms of billing and credit.

    As for specific providers, hmm, there used to be a quarterly top provider poll but I don't think we've had one for a while. Here's the 2017 provider of the year list, from January 2018:

    https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/134743/provider-poll-2017-the-winners/p1

  • @OmgpleaseRead said:
    Or easier than reseller and better for your reputation (given all of the many many many VPS provider flame outs around here), pick 3 or 4 outstanding, longstanding providers at multiple price points ie buyvm, ramnode, hetzner, digital ocean and refer your clients to them. At the minimum you know you would have stable providers and generate some referral fees. Best of all your reputation won't get tarnished by the summer host flame out of the month. Building a terrific reputation for stability is beneficial in the long run. Managing resellers that are the third or forth provider in line from the bare metal owner doesn't seem fruitful to me.

    Good idea, I was also thinking about a 'bigger' and more 'known' host so reputation won't be damaged.

    @willie said:

    Cannonb4lls said:

    Yes, I had the same idea to do this. Anyone have some VPS hosts that they recommend so I can contact those?

    I'd suggest implementing the feature including any needed WHMCS integration, then announcing it here, inviting beta test participants.

    At the other end of things you could possibly resell some hosting services, i.e. have some controls in Ploi to spin up new instances on Linode/DO/Hetzner etc., i.e. hourly providers with API's. Maybe monthly ones too, which would widen it to the usual LET providers. I'm not sure how that would work in terms of billing and credit.

    As for specific providers, hmm, there used to be a quarterly top provider poll but I don't think we've had one for a while. Here's the 2017 provider of the year list, from January 2018:

    https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/134743/provider-poll-2017-the-winners/p1

    WHMCS integration, like 1-click-install wordpress you mean?

  • WHMCS integration, like 1-click-install wordpress you mean?

    I think they mean WHMCS integration so people can sell their own VPS and let customers manage it via Ploi. This way customers don't need to know how it works and can just buy a single package.

  • dragon2611dragon2611 Member
    edited July 2018

    Does Ploi do any kind of site isolation when it's hosting multiple sites on the same server?

    Can you backend talk to the servers over IPv6?

  • @taronyu said:

    WHMCS integration, like 1-click-install wordpress you mean?

    I think they mean WHMCS integration so people can sell their own VPS and let customers manage it via Ploi. This way customers don't need to know how it works and can just buy a single package.

    Ah right, I don't think this will happen.

    @dragon2611 said:
    Does Ploi do any kind of site isolation when it's hosting multiple sites on the same server?

    Can you backend talk to the servers over IPv6?

    Ploi creates a user which has access to all the sites. We are working on multi-user.

    You can talk over IPv6, if your server has this setup (Ploi has nothing to do with this actually)

  • Ah right, I don't think this will happen.

    @dragon2611 said:
    Does Ploi do any kind of site isolation when it's hosting multiple sites on the same server?

    Can you backend talk to the servers over IPv6?

    Ploi creates a user which has access to all the sites. We are working on multi-user.

    You can talk over IPv6, if your server has this setup (Ploi has nothing to do with this actually)

    The question was can your backend servers talk to My server over IPv6, for instance with runcloud the server can have IPv6 and it can serve sites on IPv6 but it also has to have a Non Natted (Well actually 121 NAT does work) IPv4 for runcloud to talk back to them, you cannot for instance install it on a NAT VPS/IPv6 only VPS.

  • @dragon2611 said:

    Ah right, I don't think this will happen.

    @dragon2611 said:
    Does Ploi do any kind of site isolation when it's hosting multiple sites on the same server?

    Can you backend talk to the servers over IPv6?

    Ploi creates a user which has access to all the sites. We are working on multi-user.

    You can talk over IPv6, if your server has this setup (Ploi has nothing to do with this actually)

    The question was can your backend servers talk to My server over IPv6, for instance with runcloud the server can have IPv6 and it can serve sites on IPv6 but it also has to have a Non Natted (Well actually 121 NAT does work) IPv4 for runcloud to talk back to them, you cannot for instance install it on a NAT VPS/IPv6 only VPS.

    Ah, did not understand that. Currently no, IPv6 is not supported. We have this on the todo-list but no ETA when this will be implemented.

  • @OP I assume these plan for dedicated server. Any cheaper plan for VPS usage?

  • @Aluminat said:
    @OP I assume these plan for dedicated server. Any cheaper plan for VPS usage?

    No, you can choose which server you like to use. Ploi is not a server hosting, its a server manager.

    VPS or dedicated server does not matter, thats up to you.

    Thanked by 1Aluminat
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