Self Hosting

[BlwAvg]

I've been having a great time exploring the app – it's genuinely fun and engaging. However, I'm currently grappling with understanding the advantages of self-hosting, especially considering that all our data ultimately resides in the cloud. It somewhat feels as though I'm merely providing a free compute resource for puter.com.

I'm eager to hear your thoughts or insights on this. Maybe there's an aspect of self-hosting benefits I'm overlooking? Looking forward to a lively discussion!

[jelveh]

UPDATE 2: Puter is now self-hostable 🎉

UPDATE: Self-hosting should be out first week of April. It's actively under development.

Self-hosting has been requested many times (on Reddit and elsewhere). People want to use their own servers with Puter's capabilities. I think we should listen to users and build it for them!

It somewhat feels as though I'm merely providing a free compute resource for puter.com.

This is categorically false. The code is open-source so you can check for yourself.

[BlwAvg]

This is categorically false. The code is open-source so you can check for yourself.

I noticed that even when we opt for local hosting, there are still storage limits in place, and surprisingly, our accounts remain linked to puter.com. I was under the impression that choosing to self-host would mean leveraging local storage for our needs and managing authentication independently (or auth only like Plex), rather than being tethered to puter.com. This observation reinforces my initial feeling of essentially providing complimentary computing power to puter.com, especially since the same limitations apply.

Could someone shed some light on the rationale behind these constraints? Is there a technical or strategic reason for such an approach? I'm all ears for your insights or explanations!

[jelveh]

Is there a technical or strategic reason for such an approach?

This is purely technical. The kernel (i.e. backend) on puter.com works only in a very specific geo-replicated, multi-tenant environment, so releasing that would not benefit users at all, hell it costs a lot of money just to run it! We're working on a self-hosted single-tenant kernel that you can run locally or on your own server which is much easier to set up and cheaper to run. So right now even though the GUI connects to puter.com as the kernel this is gonna change in a few weeks.

Additionally, everything is open so anybody could build a custom backend for Puter if they wanted.

[BlwAvg]

Awesome! Answers the question perfectly.

thank you for your time Jelveh.

[KernelDeimos]

This observation reinforces my initial feeling of essentially providing complimentary computing power to puter.com

To clarify on this point, it's more accurately the other way around. When you run the desktop environment it's using the resources provided by puter.com, and that's all on our own infrastructure - it's the same authentication/accounts and filesystem.

As @jelveh stated, we're working on an open-source kernel for Puter. It's a lot of work; it's incredibly important that we release it with an architecture that facilitates productive contributions, and that it doesn't require setting up cloud infrastructure to run.

[subjadeites]

Perhaps a permission control system needs to be added for self-hosting. I don't want everyone to have access to my self-hosted Puter.
Including: registration restrictions, whether visitor threads are allowed, etc.

[Kreijstal]

I would instead would love everyone to have access to it, within reason

[jelveh]

I think this is a good idea and we'll eventually implement it. It's not a priority rn as we have a massive backlog of critical tasks. Feel free to submit a PR, I'd be happy to review it.