We're pleased to announce the release of our new self-hosting environment for Standard Notes which consumes significantly less resources than our now legacy setup. The legacy setup required hosting 10 Docker containers for our first-party services and consumed approximately 1.7GB of ram. Our new setup condenses all of our first party services to only 1 container consuming approximately 550MB of ram.
In addition, it does away with the custom shell script require to provision the server. In the past, you would need to run commands like ./server.sh setup and ./server.sh start—now, you only need to interface with Docker compose directly: docker compose up and docker compose pull. The startup speed of the infrastructure has also improved dramatically, from several minutes to less than a minute (depending on your environment).
The new and improved V2 self-hosting environment is the culmination of an arduous and singular internal focus on self-hosting over the last couple months, and addresses most, if not all, of the painpoints users have expressed with self-hosting since its inception.
We're glad to be able to dedicate our full-time resources towards self-hosting, which in the past has proved difficult to do, due to a disharmony in economic alignment. As an independent company with revenue coming only from our subscribers, our business instincts have coerced us to centralize focus towards efforts which procure the "next day's meal," so to speak.
We released a revised approach to our self-hosting economics last month which has powered this change and afforded us an increase in resource allocation towards this scope.
Our new approach to self-hosting economics can be summed up as: freemium clients, free server. That is, using our official client distributions entitles you to the same free functionality as everyone else, but does not entitle you to gain free access to advanced client features we build that are intended to procure funding for our product. Users are free however to compile and run their own personal version of the client applications that removes paywalls, for example.
Resources to help you on your way:
- To begin self-hosting Standard Notes, check out our new self-hosting guide that will have you up and running in just a few steps.
- If you previously self-hosted and would look to migrate to the new setup, please read our migration guide.
- If you have any questions or issues, please post an issue to our server repository on GitHub, or join our Discord and post in the #self-hosting channel.
Thanks for reading ✓
