Ask HN: How to go about ceating an public instance of my FOSS webpastebin?

1 points by szab 3 years ago | 1 comment

Hello, I am the maintainer of https://github.com/szabodanika/microbin, a simple pastebin web app that a lot of people love to self-host and I would love an official, high performance, high availability instance of this to exist that everyone can use, as a slightly modified fork of the original project. The domain and the server would cost me some money and I would like the project to cover this expense on its own, but without annoying any users. I was thinking 1-2 simple blockable side banner ads but I'm not quite sure if that will annoy anyone or will even cover the costs. Maybe I should forget about this and just pay for it myself as it's my project after all. Is there any other way I could make one or possibly more instances of this service public without much investment/earn the investment back? One important thing is that I wouldn't like to ask anyone to host it on their own personal servers (as someone generously offered before) to keep management easier and just in case users do anything nasty (which I expect they will at one point).

Comevius 3 years ago |

You can have a sponsor button on GitHub.

Or you can figure out a way to monetize it as a managed service. I would make a browser extension and charge for storage. It wouldn't cost much to run it, though the egress fees can potentially sabotage your profit. Also anyone can copy your business with just a few lines of code in Cloudflare Workers, so you would have to rely on branding and word of mouth.