edit: I see somebody beat me to it :)
* Pricing hint:
- Go either more expensive with the monthly plan, or cheaper with the yearly. For only 5% off I would not go for the yearly commitment.
- Display your yearly price also as 4.74$ & 14.24$ per month instead of the big yearly sum as the big number requires me as customer to pull out my calculator to see the actual saving
- Add Call to actions to the pricing boxes e.g. "Signup now for Business plan", even it just redirects to the signup page, it has less friction for me as customer
* Other website feedback:
- I don't find a imprint. If you control my website, I would like to know who you are.
- I assume you are not a native english speaker (me neither), as some sentences sound a bit weird on the site. Maybe get a proofreader. (I do that for my projects and it increases the sites a lot :D)
- Especially for the target group you mentioned I think the automatic rollback is a good selling argument. As if you only use e.g. FTP and overwrite files, everyone knows that feeling of accidentally overwritten a wrong file or with an old version.
- For being GDPR compliant your privacy policy is not enough
- Unlimited Bandwidth could be a bad idea as some high traffic sites could cost you a lot
- A SLA would be nice to have, like "99.9% uptime" to know you are trustworthy and my site will not be down for month
* Feature ideas:
- Automatically add lazy loading for images
Settings up Cloudflare or AWS CloudFront + S3 is easy for users who all familiar with technologies. What I have seen is, there are many web designers out there who design awesome websites but lacks technical knowledge. My brother was like that, he designs websites but I was the one who was helping him to host and write PHP scripts for handling form submissions etc... that's one reason I built a service like this.
Thank you for the suggestion on pricing, I'll consider it and update it accordingly.
Update:
Image lazy loading enabled when website optimization settings is set to "Full"
You should calculate everything and move your prices up as you have unlimited bandwidth. I have few static websites, but smallest one generates on avg. 400gb monthly transfer(plain website with main content), adding to this image optimisation(sizes, etc) and few other options totalling nearly 1TB+ a month.
So for me $15 looks nice, but you would loose a huge amount of money on clients like me. You can't expect that static website will weight 1MB and eat 1GB of bandwidth a month. :)
This is why Cloudflare has image optimisation in Business plan, or Imgix which is pricey. :)
"Clodui automatically minifies all your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, then served in compressed gzip format to further reduce the file size. All the requests served over HTTP/2, which further boosts your website speed."
would be much easier to read if it were reworded like so:
"Clodui automatically minifies all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. These minified files are then compressed and served over HTTP/2, which further boosts your websites speed."
If you want help cleaning up more of it, contact me at my username @ gmail.
We launched a very similar service (fast.io) a few months ago and have found some good interest in the product. Unfortunately, however, there are many other good solutions for simple deployments and performant static hosting. My question for you would be, what are you doing that solves your customer's problem so much better than competitors that they'd be willing to put their mission-critical website on your (unproven) service over anyone else's?
For these simple use-cases (the ones you appear to be targeting) most users just aren't willing to pay. The more sophisticated users who are running businesses (and would pay) often need more features and greater control over their hosting solution - features that will take you a long time to build out and prove in the market.
As such, we're working on a product pivot that's educated by the insights we've gained through our initial launch. We don't want to go head-on with other products that are, quite frankly, doing a great job in this market already. I'll be really curious to see/hear if you encounter similar challenges and how you navigate them.
I haven't seen them post to a Show HN to shamelessly promote and link to their own rival version, so that's one difference.
A Google search is going to yield a lot of great other companies for static hosting like https://netlify.com (which even supports this exact functionality of drag and drop uploads) and https://zeit.co just to name a couple, not to mention a graveyard of other services who've tried to do similar things over the last 5 years. You might even notice that we've changed our messaging to focus on file-sharing and direct links - not website hosting.
- In the ToS there's no mention of the company I'm making the agreement with
- I'd appreciate an about page about who's behind this, but my first point kinda explains it :)
- What CDN are you using? Have you built your own?
ToS needs to be re-written; currently, I used an online service to generate it :(
At first I read Cloud UI, but after pausing a little I realized it was not Cloud UI.
I mention this because I think names matter for word-of-mouth recommendation. In many interviews, Morgan Freeman would recount that The Shawshank Redemption bombed at the box-office because back in the day word-of-mouth was still dominant way of getting movie recommendations, and people couldn't say or remember the word "Shawshank".
The image resizing and optimization is a good sell, but it's dramatically more expensive to have it when under the hood it's a relatively cheap feature aside from initial build out, and it's available in basic form for free on places like Netlify.
One thing I noticed is the slow connection from Australia, it seems your CDN is limited to Europe and America.
yes caching and gzip is done by web servers. Clodui does much more than that
* minification of CSS, JS and HTML
* automatic webp image generation, dynamic image resize
* and the website is served via CDN, which connects to the nearest CDN server
* automatic form handling etc...
We're really targeting users with less technical knowledge in server-side but creates awesome websites.
