7 ms·

Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

46 points by baconomatic 7y ago

davidu 7y ago
This is a great passive income type of business. Here's a nearly identical version that a number of folks use: https://hostifi.net/ https://hostifi.net/
- reillychase 7y ago
  Thanks for the mention! It's certainly not passive though (like I thought it was going to be when I started it lol), I'm working on it 40+ hours/week and just hired our first support engineer, Safwan. He used to work for Ubiquiti support for 2 years before he joined this month. We've got over 25,000 Ubiquiti devices connected across ~600 servers. The daily work involves helping people with support questions, demos, migrations, testing UniFi updates, rolling them out to the servers, setting up SSL certs, and developing new features. We're working on a new website currently as well.
  - mantoto 7y ago
    Cool. Nice little business you build there :)
dsl 7y ago
How is this different from or any better than Ubiquiti's Cloud Controller hosting? Also based on your pricing it is cheaper to buy a Cloud Key if you plan to use your devices longer than 10 months.
- teilo 7y ago
  Central control of multiple sites without having to mess with VPNs.
  - tjoff 7y ago
    Why would you need any vpns? Especially if the vpns are setup from the controller you create a delicate chicken-and-egg problem. How are you to provision it the first time? You also open up yourself to the problem of accidentally locking sites out and having to reconfigure each site from within.
    - teilo 7y ago
      You are overthinking this. If you have a VM running the controller, or a cloud key, on your internal network, you would need to VPN in to manage them remotely.
      - tjoff 7y ago
        No? If you have any remote sites you need it to be directly accessable from the internet anyway. Or am I missing something? Now you might not like that, but realize that this service is exactly that. You might be comforted by the fact that a breach of the controller doesn't affect your internal networks. ...until you realize that having control over the controller means root access on all of your sites. So it shouldn't be that comforting.
        teilo 7y ago
        I'm not advocating that any enterprise use this service. I run a WAN with 4 local sites (on a MetroE MPLS network) and a remote office via a VPN tunnel. So this is not my first rodeo. I would never use a cloud-based WiFi controller for the very reasons you specify, and that means that if I need to remotely manage Wifi while I'm out of the office, I'm using a VPN. A lot of companies don't have the same security concerns. That's all I'm saying. And some for those who, say, manage wifi access intended for the public at multiple sites, like a Hotel or coffeeshop chain for example, this might be just the ticket. They don't have to setup and maintain a bunch of individual controllers, and can centralize everything in one console, and let someone else maintain the server it runs on.
        tjoff 7y ago
- scohesc 7y ago
  Instead of having to configure potentially tens of different site-to-site VPN connections to connect every site to your head office where you controller is located, you're hosting it on the internet which makes implementation easier. I would never ever trust a Ubiquiti product being open on the internet though - especially their software products. Too many issues with their firmware on their "carrier"-classed radios, as well as buggy integration with UNMS makes me a bit wary.
  - Xylakant 7y ago
    > Instead of having to configure potentially tens of different site-to-site VPN connections to connect every site to your head office where you controller is located, you're hosting it on the internet which makes implementation easier. Unifi offers a cloud controller as hosted service, see https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006288413 https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006288413.
- reillychase 7y ago
  You're assuming that there is just one location, and if so, it is cheaper to buy a Cloud Key than use a service like this or https://hostifi.net https://hostifi.net The benefit comes in when you have many locations, and can replace a bunch of Cloud Keys with a single server, and have someone else manage updates for you and help with support questions. At HostiFi 90% of my customers are IT service providers who use the service to replace a ton of Cloud Keys with the single server. Ubiquiti's cloud offering is very expensive ($299/year base fee + $199/year for each +10 devices), and from customers who have told me about it before they switched to HostiFi, the support is not good, they don't keep the servers updated, and you can't get access to use a custom domain name/modify some of the stuff under the hood.
kryogen1c 7y ago
This seems like a weird product, considering its just a single-use VPS. If you're using a DC with NPS (or not, just plain ol PSK) in the sky, your ubiquiti controller just goes on there anyway. Some clients just allow access via site-to-site vpns. Seems like a better solution than paying for a VPS to host free software
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  Fair point..."free" often means "without regard for time" however. Even though I don't have a use for this one, I pay for various services which I could do/run myself, because I only have 24 hours a day.
gmu3 7y ago
I've been running my controller on a raspberry pi for a few years without any issues
- davidu 7y ago
  I've been running one in AWS on a micro instance and I don't like running it. I'd have paid for this had I seen it when I was doing this.
- ilikepi 7y ago
  I'd like to move mine to a Pi, but I'm a little concerned about storage. Do you store the controller database on the internal SD card or do you have it on a more robust external/network storage device?
  - GreenJelloShot 7y ago
    Store everything on the SD card but make sure to create a backup image, just in case.
jimnotgym 7y ago
I have a cloud key on each site, and use the unifi cloud controller. No VPNs, no problems. Actually surprised anyone does anything else!
CameronBanga 7y ago
I've been using Hostifi for a year+ I think now. If anyone is looking for a similar service, I highly recommend: https://hostifi.net https://hostifi.net Pricing is better IMO if you have any serious number of devices. The founder has created as an open startup (https://rchase.com https://rchase.com) and has been making good profit, so less concern of it going under too. No offense to OP on that, but switching to something like this can be a bunch of time personally, so want a clear path for startup. Finally, and this is an personal story I know. But the support on Hostifi is fantastic. They have a knowledge base and their team is more than happy to help when issues come up. Which is great because I love the software, but am not a personal expert.
- zomg 7y ago
  +1 for hostifi. i've been using them for my home AP's for a couple years now. i sent tech support a couple questions and reilly himself emailed me back. great guy and he was very, very helpful.
xoa 7y ago
L3 hosting and UniFi is now unfortunately just one of the many, many areas where it feels like Ubiquiti just kind of quit on it many years ago. It's really unfortunate but I've really gotten that sinking feeling about the platform for the last year or two now, with their killing of the forums and no replacement/upgrade for the bug/feature tracking part being the final straw. But overall they seem to show a lot of the classic signs of basic internal dysfunction, tons of effort expended on surface gloss and re-skinning things over and over again (yet then failing to even quickly bring feature parity up), lots of basic features and even merely keeping internal components up to date disregarded, ever increasing technical debt in the hardware line due to failure to update and replace now ancient kit (which instead they still sell new at full price). Something is going to have to give at some point. Unfortunately I don't see anything else in the same position either. It's such a depressing waste of potential.
- paulgerhardt 7y ago
  I finally switched to UniFi equipment after hearing for years how much better it is than consumer WiFi equipment. Oh man, what a headache. Depending how one configured things, there’s at least 3 ways to provision devices - all 3 incompatible and will cause issues with each other. User manuals refer to Apps no longer in existence. In no instance have I had a “just works” experience. In two instances the option I needed to configure was not available through any of the 3 (4?) dashboards and I had to resort to sshing into the device. 4 weeks later I’m still experiencing ISP fiber modem disconnect issues every 48 hours and can not connect remotely to debug. The impression I get is 90% of the performance “gains” one gets from switching from Asus to Ubiquiti come from dedicating one $300 piece of hardware (which overheats) for each network function (firewall, switch, router, AP) rather than using a single threaded all-in-one device. Then people still bolt on accessory devices like pi-holes when a USG should be perfectly capable of performing the task.
  - reillychase 7y ago
    I'm not a big fan of their Ubiquiti Device Discovery Tool, I always recommend using SSH method for adoption which is very reliable: https://support.hostifi.net/en/articles/3044211-unifi-cloud-adoption-ssh-method https://support.hostifi.net/en/articles/3044211-unifi-cloud-...
zamalek 7y ago
Nobody who has 5 devices will pay $10/mo for this; they are all doing what I am: booting the controller on-demand (or some other local solution). Less than $10pa would seem appropriate (and I'd snap that up in a heartbeat).
- reillychase 7y ago
  At https://hostifi.net https://hostifi.net we are working on 2 new plans launching soon, a 5 device $3.99/month or $39/year plan and a 3 site, 15 device plan at $9.99/month or $99/year. Trying to find the price point for those small install/home users is tricky. Our primary customers are the IT/MSP business owners who manage all of their customer networks from one server.
bhouston 7y ago
ubiquity are totally going to find a way to block this.
- shankspeaks 7y ago
  If they did, they'll have to stop offering the controller for free, but that would really hurty their SMB/Enterprise adoption.
joecot 7y ago
Question, since a number of folks have chimed in about using various cloud hosted controllers: how do you initially setup the network (given that you presumably need the router to have internet access to connect to the cloud controller), and how do you handle it if there's an internet connectivity problem? My office currently has an internal network VM that runs the controller, and we might move to a Cloud Key, but I'm curious how folks handle having a cloud controller for their Unifi router when their Unifi router might lose internet. Or are most folks using the controllers to manage Ubiquiti wifi hotspots without using the USG as their main router? We're a small shop of around 20 desktops or so, 2 switches, and 1 router, with a couple external static IPs. I can see the benefit for trying to orchestrate multiple sites using a cloud controller, but I'd be worried about doing it for a single site given internet issues, unless there's something I'm missing.
- v0tary 7y ago
  Devices keep running even if the controller goes down. Just no Config updates during outage unless you connect directly to device and change there.
- reillychase 7y ago
  Hi Joe! At https://hostifi.net https://hostifi.net we have tons of people using the USGs and connecting them to the cloud server. The USG actually is the only UniFi device that has a web gui and it has configuration options for setting up the WAN before you adopt it specifically to solve that problem - how to get internet up so you can adopt to a cloud server. If you have a couple static IPs at one site though, keep in mind that the USG can only do one static IP (without having to dive into CLI), so for any more advanced network like that most people are using a different router vendor but sticking with the UAPs and UniFi switches for the rest of the network. We also have lots of people using both the built-in hotspot portal pages as well as external portals just fine. As others have mentioned, if the controller goes down, the networks do not go down. All of the device settings are stored locally and don't depend on the controller, the only exception being that the hotspot pages do require the controller to be online in order to work.
  - 7y ago
mister_hn 7y ago
Hi, would you make this also as a downloadable and on-premise version to run on my own homelab? That would be cool!
- shankspeaks 7y ago
  I doubt it would make sense for them to do it. Most of the heavy lifting is from the controller which you could run anyway on prem and for FREE. The cloud deployment AFAIK would allow for better multi-tenant management, and SaaSifying the management experience. From personal experience, running the controller on a Pi in your home network is good enough for most scenarios. Plus if you want to customize, you can poke around the APIs and wire up what you want. It's pretty powerful once you get the hang of it, and there are some fabulous libraries available thanks to community contributions on Github.
abdalmatin16 7y ago
Look good

46 points by baconomatic 7y ago

This is a great passive income type of business. Here's a nearly identical version that a number of folks use: https://hostifi.net/ https://hostifi.net/

reillychase 7y ago
Thanks for the mention! It's certainly not passive though (like I thought it was going to be when I started it lol), I'm working on it 40+ hours/week and just hired our first support engineer, Safwan. He used to work for Ubiquiti support for 2 years before he joined this month. We've got over 25,000 Ubiquiti devices connected across ~600 servers. The daily work involves helping people with support questions, demos, migrations, testing UniFi updates, rolling them out to the servers, setting up SSL certs, and developing new features. We're working on a new website currently as well.
- mantoto 7y ago
  Cool. Nice little business you build there :)

dsl 7y ago

How is this different from or any better than Ubiquiti's Cloud Controller hosting? Also based on your pricing it is cheaper to buy a Cloud Key if you plan to use your devices longer than 10 months.

teilo 7y ago
Central control of multiple sites without having to mess with VPNs.
- tjoff 7y ago
  Why would you need any vpns? Especially if the vpns are setup from the controller you create a delicate chicken-and-egg problem. How are you to provision it the first time? You also open up yourself to the problem of accidentally locking sites out and having to reconfigure each site from within.
  - teilo 7y ago
    You are overthinking this. If you have a VM running the controller, or a cloud key, on your internal network, you would need to VPN in to manage them remotely.
    - tjoff 7y ago
      No? If you have any remote sites you need it to be directly accessable from the internet anyway. Or am I missing something? Now you might not like that, but realize that this service is exactly that. You might be comforted by the fact that a breach of the controller doesn't affect your internal networks. ...until you realize that having control over the controller means root access on all of your sites. So it shouldn't be that comforting.
      - teilo 7y ago
        I'm not advocating that any enterprise use this service. I run a WAN with 4 local sites (on a MetroE MPLS network) and a remote office via a VPN tunnel. So this is not my first rodeo. I would never use a cloud-based WiFi controller for the very reasons you specify, and that means that if I need to remotely manage Wifi while I'm out of the office, I'm using a VPN. A lot of companies don't have the same security concerns. That's all I'm saying. And some for those who, say, manage wifi access intended for the public at multiple sites, like a Hotel or coffeeshop chain for example, this might be just the ticket. They don't have to setup and maintain a bunch of individual controllers, and can centralize everything in one console, and let someone else maintain the server it runs on.
        tjoff 7y ago
scohesc 7y ago
Instead of having to configure potentially tens of different site-to-site VPN connections to connect every site to your head office where you controller is located, you're hosting it on the internet which makes implementation easier. I would never ever trust a Ubiquiti product being open on the internet though - especially their software products. Too many issues with their firmware on their "carrier"-classed radios, as well as buggy integration with UNMS makes me a bit wary.
- Xylakant 7y ago
  > Instead of having to configure potentially tens of different site-to-site VPN connections to connect every site to your head office where you controller is located, you're hosting it on the internet which makes implementation easier. Unifi offers a cloud controller as hosted service, see https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006288413 https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006288413.
reillychase 7y ago
You're assuming that there is just one location, and if so, it is cheaper to buy a Cloud Key than use a service like this or https://hostifi.net https://hostifi.net The benefit comes in when you have many locations, and can replace a bunch of Cloud Keys with a single server, and have someone else manage updates for you and help with support questions. At HostiFi 90% of my customers are IT service providers who use the service to replace a ton of Cloud Keys with the single server. Ubiquiti's cloud offering is very expensive ($299/year base fee + $199/year for each +10 devices), and from customers who have told me about it before they switched to HostiFi, the support is not good, they don't keep the servers updated, and you can't get access to use a custom domain name/modify some of the stuff under the hood.

kryogen1c 7y ago

This seems like a weird product, considering its just a single-use VPS. If you're using a DC with NPS (or not, just plain ol PSK) in the sky, your ubiquiti controller just goes on there anyway. Some clients just allow access via site-to-site vpns. Seems like a better solution than paying for a VPS to host free software

Piskvorrr 7y ago
Fair point..."free" often means "without regard for time" however. Even though I don't have a use for this one, I pay for various services which I could do/run myself, because I only have 24 hours a day.

gmu3 7y ago

I've been running my controller on a raspberry pi for a few years without any issues

davidu 7y ago
I've been running one in AWS on a micro instance and I don't like running it. I'd have paid for this had I seen it when I was doing this.
ilikepi 7y ago
I'd like to move mine to a Pi, but I'm a little concerned about storage. Do you store the controller database on the internal SD card or do you have it on a more robust external/network storage device?
- GreenJelloShot 7y ago
  Store everything on the SD card but make sure to create a backup image, just in case.

jimnotgym 7y ago

I have a cloud key on each site, and use the unifi cloud controller. No VPNs, no problems. Actually surprised anyone does anything else!

CameronBanga 7y ago

I've been using Hostifi for a year+ I think now. If anyone is looking for a similar service, I highly recommend: https://hostifi.net https://hostifi.net Pricing is better IMO if you have any serious number of devices. The founder has created as an open startup (https://rchase.com https://rchase.com) and has been making good profit, so less concern of it going under too. No offense to OP on that, but switching to something like this can be a bunch of time personally, so want a clear path for startup. Finally, and this is an personal story I know. But the support on Hostifi is fantastic. They have a knowledge base and their team is more than happy to help when issues come up. Which is great because I love the software, but am not a personal expert.

zomg 7y ago
+1 for hostifi. i've been using them for my home AP's for a couple years now. i sent tech support a couple questions and reilly himself emailed me back. great guy and he was very, very helpful.

xoa 7y ago

L3 hosting and UniFi is now unfortunately just one of the many, many areas where it feels like Ubiquiti just kind of quit on it many years ago. It's really unfortunate but I've really gotten that sinking feeling about the platform for the last year or two now, with their killing of the forums and no replacement/upgrade for the bug/feature tracking part being the final straw. But overall they seem to show a lot of the classic signs of basic internal dysfunction, tons of effort expended on surface gloss and re-skinning things over and over again (yet then failing to even quickly bring feature parity up), lots of basic features and even merely keeping internal components up to date disregarded, ever increasing technical debt in the hardware line due to failure to update and replace now ancient kit (which instead they still sell new at full price). Something is going to have to give at some point. Unfortunately I don't see anything else in the same position either. It's such a depressing waste of potential.

paulgerhardt 7y ago
I finally switched to UniFi equipment after hearing for years how much better it is than consumer WiFi equipment. Oh man, what a headache. Depending how one configured things, there’s at least 3 ways to provision devices - all 3 incompatible and will cause issues with each other. User manuals refer to Apps no longer in existence. In no instance have I had a “just works” experience. In two instances the option I needed to configure was not available through any of the 3 (4?) dashboards and I had to resort to sshing into the device. 4 weeks later I’m still experiencing ISP fiber modem disconnect issues every 48 hours and can not connect remotely to debug. The impression I get is 90% of the performance “gains” one gets from switching from Asus to Ubiquiti come from dedicating one $300 piece of hardware (which overheats) for each network function (firewall, switch, router, AP) rather than using a single threaded all-in-one device. Then people still bolt on accessory devices like pi-holes when a USG should be perfectly capable of performing the task.
- reillychase 7y ago
  I'm not a big fan of their Ubiquiti Device Discovery Tool, I always recommend using SSH method for adoption which is very reliable: https://support.hostifi.net/en/articles/3044211-unifi-cloud-adoption-ssh-method https://support.hostifi.net/en/articles/3044211-unifi-cloud-...

zamalek 7y ago

Nobody who has 5 devices will pay $10/mo for this; they are all doing what I am: booting the controller on-demand (or some other local solution). Less than $10pa would seem appropriate (and I'd snap that up in a heartbeat).

reillychase 7y ago
At https://hostifi.net https://hostifi.net we are working on 2 new plans launching soon, a 5 device $3.99/month or $39/year plan and a 3 site, 15 device plan at $9.99/month or $99/year. Trying to find the price point for those small install/home users is tricky. Our primary customers are the IT/MSP business owners who manage all of their customer networks from one server.

bhouston 7y ago

ubiquity are totally going to find a way to block this.

shankspeaks 7y ago
If they did, they'll have to stop offering the controller for free, but that would really hurty their SMB/Enterprise adoption.

joecot 7y ago

Question, since a number of folks have chimed in about using various cloud hosted controllers: how do you initially setup the network (given that you presumably need the router to have internet access to connect to the cloud controller), and how do you handle it if there's an internet connectivity problem? My office currently has an internal network VM that runs the controller, and we might move to a Cloud Key, but I'm curious how folks handle having a cloud controller for their Unifi router when their Unifi router might lose internet. Or are most folks using the controllers to manage Ubiquiti wifi hotspots without using the USG as their main router? We're a small shop of around 20 desktops or so, 2 switches, and 1 router, with a couple external static IPs. I can see the benefit for trying to orchestrate multiple sites using a cloud controller, but I'd be worried about doing it for a single site given internet issues, unless there's something I'm missing.

v0tary 7y ago
Devices keep running even if the controller goes down. Just no Config updates during outage unless you connect directly to device and change there.
reillychase 7y ago
Hi Joe! At https://hostifi.net https://hostifi.net we have tons of people using the USGs and connecting them to the cloud server. The USG actually is the only UniFi device that has a web gui and it has configuration options for setting up the WAN before you adopt it specifically to solve that problem - how to get internet up so you can adopt to a cloud server. If you have a couple static IPs at one site though, keep in mind that the USG can only do one static IP (without having to dive into CLI), so for any more advanced network like that most people are using a different router vendor but sticking with the UAPs and UniFi switches for the rest of the network. We also have lots of people using both the built-in hotspot portal pages as well as external portals just fine. As others have mentioned, if the controller goes down, the networks do not go down. All of the device settings are stored locally and don't depend on the controller, the only exception being that the hotspot pages do require the controller to be online in order to work.
- 7y ago

mister_hn 7y ago

Hi, would you make this also as a downloadable and on-premise version to run on my own homelab? That would be cool!

shankspeaks 7y ago
I doubt it would make sense for them to do it. Most of the heavy lifting is from the controller which you could run anyway on prem and for FREE. The cloud deployment AFAIK would allow for better multi-tenant management, and SaaSifying the management experience. From personal experience, running the controller on a Pi in your home network is good enough for most scenarios. Plus if you want to customize, you can poke around the APIs and wire up what you want. It's pretty powerful once you get the hang of it, and there are some fabulous libraries available thanks to community contributions on Github.

abdalmatin16 7y ago

Look good