4 Self-hosting Web Application Platforms
By
Kanishk Jain
Why pay a hefty amount when you can host your favorite web applications yourself, on your server, in your network.
For a startup, small to a large organization – there are multiple open source and commercial software available which helps you to run the popular productivity, project management, chat, documents, etc. in an easy way on a public cloud or premises.
The following are the software packed platform, choose the one which fits your requirement.
Sandstorm
Sandstorm is an open-source server platform with more than 70 applications for a small team, development, or medium to large organization.
You can install apps in just one click and will be available to your users. Some of the popular applications are:
- Simple chat – for communication and collaboration
- GitWeb – Git web interface
- Davros – document storage
- Hugo, WordPress, Ghost – for documents and web publishing
- Piwik – for analytics
Sandstorm offers single sign-on, so users don’t have to remember credentials for each application. Let’s take a look at some of the features.
- You can see who has access to your grains(document, file, etc.) and even revoke permissions at any time
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- Centralized dashboard to have all the application data in one place
- Audit log to review who access what
Take a look at the app market place to see it satisfy your requirement.
YunoHost
YonoHost is a Debian-based, primarily designed to make self-hosting available to everyone. It is completely open-source, and the source code is available on Github. They got more than 100 applications including:
- Kanboard – for task management
- Nextcloud – share files, calendar, mail
- phpMyadmin – SQL database administration
- Roundcube – webmail
- Cachet – status page
- Discourse – discussion/forum platform
- Grafana – metrics and analytics dashboard
YunoHost got a friendly user and administration console. The following are some of its features.
- Manage users through LDAP
- Backup and restore
- Secure with Let’s Encrypt certificate
- Inbuilt yunohost firewall
Its lightweight software which can be installed on 1GB RAM and 500 MHz CPU.
Cloudron
Manage Gitlab, Ghost, OpenVPN, Mattermost, Confluence, Paperwork and a lot more smoothly with Cloudron. It is portable which means no hassle when you want to move to another server or cloud platform like DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, AWS, Linode, etc.
Cloudron uses Docker container internally to isolate the application from each other.
You have an option to store the backup to the external storage like S3, DO Spaces, or GCS. If you decide to go with Cloudron and don’t want to set it up yourself, you can try Kamatera who gives you Cloudron with one click at as low as $4 a month.
DPlatform
DPlatform is entirely free software with its source code available on Github. It is Docker ready.
Features
- It comes with a nice UI that assists in the easy automated installation
- With systemd integration, you can manage all the App services such as view apps services status, one-click start/stop, auto-start at boot, and auto-restart if down unexpectedly
Conclusion
Save money with the above self-hosted application platform. They all got great documentation, and you can install them in less than 30 minutes.
Next, explore the Slack alternative messaging solution.
