Every month I spend more money just to manage my servers and apps than actually running them. Having multiple providers to manage different projects and frameworks isn't great. I want a solution that is fair, doesn't have limits - like the amount of servers - and ticks a few essential boxes with flexibility.

If you’re a freelancer or a small time dev, running your own servers, and using multiple frameworks you know that you usually have to jump through hoops to get everything up and running. Not to mention using different providers for your specific use case or framework.

This is my exact problem right now, in fact it has been like this for years! I run PHP projects (namely CMS’s), Ruby based projects (Rails) and an army of static websites from basic HTML to one-page JS apps built with Jekyll, React and others.

At best you can combine several providers to get the job done for you. I’m a visual person and also like things to be easy, so having a web app that can manage my servers is an absolute life saver. As a freelancer I don’t want to mess around with server configuration.

However, here is the rub… these services usually cost a hefty amount each month, they oppose limits to how many servers you can run on a price plan and, in most cases, limit what you can run on the servers without having to actually SSH into your server.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s good that a tool exists for a specific toolset and I’m very grateful that they exist today and make it easier to run my day to day operations with ease.

I’m looking at combining the best of all worlds in one service, to satisfy my own needs right now. Not only that, I also want to learn much more about server set up. I already have a good understanding of it all, however I really want to dig into the bare metal of it all to truly appreciate it. Not only that, I also want to learn how to take this knowledge and combine it with a web app.

Life is busy as it is, so if I can work on something that replaces two or even three providers with one then that’s good in my book. Not only that, technically, I’ll be reducing my own monthly outgoings for managing the servers to zero. I totally understand that I need to run the infrastructure for this, but I could in theory spin up 10 basic Linode boxes ($5/month) and still come in way under what I spend now on other server management services.

So this is project Picard - a server provisioning service for Ruby on Rails, Laravel and static based projects, with zero downtime deployments. Which, of course, will include your usual mix of common PHP CMS platforms like Craft CMS or Wordpress.

A blogging series and perhaps a podcast

Like with my other challenges, I’ll be regularly blogging about the build and will also be opening up on what exact features I have in mind as time goes. I don’t want to spill the beans straight away.

I’m thinking of also doing a small micro-cast as I go for a few things. It’s a bit different for me, but I’d love to try at least. Get my voice out there. Always weird to see someone write but not know what they sound like.

Pre-register

So, getting to it… I have created a pre-registration page where you can sign up to be notified when it’s ready to launch. I took great care to make sure your data is encrypted. I can’t be PCI compliant, as I’m only one person, but I’ll try and stick to this as close as possible. Everything will be encrypted and I take security and privacy seriously. During sign up, you can also let me know if you’re interested in general updates that I will email out. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. I’m building my very own mailer for this, so no third party reliance here.

When I’m ready, I’ll be inviting a few people to help me test (if you’re interested of course).

I’ll share the link at the end of the post, however first you get to see a nice screenshot of the holding page:

OMG… THIS LOOKS LIKE A KID MADE IT! So what? I think most web apps and service try to be way too serious these days! I want to bring back a bit of fun and character. Just like most cars today… they look totally mean like they’re going to beat you up. So, I want to have a bit of fun and inject a bit of life and colour into it… whilst being extremely useful at the same time.

BUT WHAT ABOUT SERVERLESS?

Good question. It’s cool stuff, but there are still many people that just want to run a simple server and get their stuff running the tried and tested way. I totally recognise this need for serverless, but deep down I think it’s another way to put off new-comers into the world of development. So here I am trying to find a balance of usefulness and ease of use without breaking your and my head. If I ever go that route I will probably explore that.

Timelines

This project has just started and will be a rough 3 month project for me. Well, I’m giving myself 3 months for a basic, but feature rich, web application.

I already have pre-registration finished and am currently working on implementing a backend to help me manage mailing and other tools like inviting a batch of people for testing. It’s not at the top of my priority list, but it will play a good role later on in the project.

Next thing after that I’ll work on registration and login and promoting pre-registered users to a full account.

I always like to work from outside to in. So I work on it step by step like a normal person would use it.

Instead of writing the frontend first in a separate app, I’m actually going to be building the frontend straight into the app, so I don’t have to copy anything across at a later stage… because things always change as you write the actual code. This should make it a bit faster for me.

Of course, as I said, I’ll be blogging about pretty much everything again - so that’s gonna be fun for me.

Make it so!

Here is the website you can pre-register on: picard.sh.

If there are any problems, just let me know straight away. You’ll have to confirm your email in order to receive an invite email once it’s ready and the occasional update. If you don’t then I won’t email anything, just to avoid fake sign ups (it happens people!).

Anyway, I’m SUPER happy I took time to write this and announce it. I’ll be announcing specific features and pricing as we get closer, but feel free to send suggestions if you think this will be of use to you (S3 backups out the box, Python and node projects… just to give you some totally random ideas here).