[HN Gopher] We'll be ending web hosting for your apps on Glitch
___________________________________________________________________
We'll be ending web hosting for your apps on Glitch
Author : js4ever
Score : 60 points
Date : 2025-05-22 17:16 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.glitch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.glitch.com)
| busymom0 wrote:
| As someone who had never heard of them, can someone explain what
| Glitch was used for?
| js4ever wrote:
| It was a platform to create / edit / host frontend and node.js
| backend. It was popular because it was an easy and free way to
| deploy something on a playground.
|
| When it went out I was super impressed, but they failed to
| monetize it and got badly abused by bad actors
| alexjplant wrote:
| Glitch the company also used to be Fog Creek of Joel
| Spolsky/FogBugz fame.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch,_Inc.
| qilo wrote:
| . (dot) got truncated
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch,_Inc%2E
| DannyPage wrote:
| I really enjoyed using Glitch as it allowed me to quickly publish
| and iterate on various experiments or try out new libraries like
| Datasette or HTMX.
|
| I am curious what Glitch will look like after July. If they
| aren't hosting apps, will they still be hosting code and letting
| it deploy elsewhere? It says it's not a full shutdown, but it
| doesn't appear to say what will be left to do on Glitch after
| that date.
| drewda wrote:
| Glitch was acquired by Fastly a few years ago, so perhaps the
| user-facing brand will continue on for a while on top of some
| Fastly hosted services...
| steivan wrote:
| I've been a long-time Glitch user and am now looking for good
| alternative platforms. My primary use case involves online coding
| with a Node.js backend using Express and some React apps. If
| anyone has recommendations, I'd greatly appreciate it.
| LordShredda wrote:
| I'd recommend, unfortunately, buying a cheap $200 netbook and
| running cloudflare tunnel on it. As long as you're relying on
| other people's computers for hosting you'll keep looking
| forever
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| That's nearly 20 years of lowendbox provider annual payments
| for what this guy is asking for.
| lxgr wrote:
| > As long as you're relying on other people's computers for
| hosting you'll keep looking forever
|
| > running cloudflare tunnel
|
| There's some irony here.
| CharlesW wrote:
| The Cloudflare dependency is for networking, not hosting.
| It would be very impressive to see a self-hosted service
| available over the internet without introducing a 3rd-party
| dependency or two.
| lxgr wrote:
| Yes, but my point is that there are many web hosting
| services, but only very few such proxy services to my
| knowledge. (Tailscale is another great option if you
| don't need public reachability.)
|
| I don't think it's a great tradeoff, when optimizing for
| independence of specialized solutions at least.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Sorry, yes --1 I was just gently poking you about the
| idea of self-hosting outside of one's local network
| without many 3rd-parties involved.
|
| BTW, Tailscale Funnel23 (in beta) does provide public
| reachability! 2 https://tailscale.com/kb/1223/funnel 3
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpxmfpCl20c 1 Please
| enjoy this hand-typed em-dash.
| lxgr wrote:
| Oh, nice, I vaguely remembered them doing something in
| that area but forgot about the details. Thanks for the
| reminder and the artisanal typography :)
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| has the internet really changed that much?
| lxgr wrote:
| Generally, I'd say so - life behind CG-NATs can be hard
| for non-eyeballs.
|
| But fortunately IPv6 is maybe finally happening, which
| solves many of the NAT problems, and in the meantime
| there's clever things like Tailscale.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Workloads allowing, sub PS50 SBCs like _Banana Pi_ might do?
| barnabee wrote:
| My vote for doing this is to get a second hand Lenovo/HP/Dell
| mini pc.
|
| They're cheap (thanks to corporate upgrade cycles and the
| sheer number of "obsolete" models that are out there on eBay
| et al.), quiet, reliable, low power consumption, and
| generally pretty capable for the money.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| ...are you averse to just doing this stuff over a cheap VPS?
| Here's an affiliate link if you're interested.
| 1 GB RAM KVM VPS 1x vCPU Core 1 GB RAM
| 20 GB SSD 2 TB Bandwidth Price: $10.96/Year
|
| https://my.racknerd.com/aff.php?aff=2502&pid=912
|
| I don't work for Racknerd, but my business uses them for our
| clients. Most of them have low-end requirements. I mean that's
| less than $1/month right there.
| sabellito wrote:
| Wait what, 11 USD per YEAR? How.
| h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote:
| https://lowendbox.com/
|
| Lowendbox has lots of cheap shared VPS providers. For small
| projects that's all you need.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The problem is, having a server on the internet is painful
| because you have to be constantly on guard for patches - if
| not you'll get hacked sooner than later.
| barnabee wrote:
| Debian with unattended-upgrades and a [weekly] scheduled
| restart has worked for me for a _long_ time.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| It should basically be a prompt with a default of Y on
| first-time setup at this point.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| What?
| ignoramous wrote:
| 2 TB Bandwidth
|
| That's 2TB/mo. Pretty sweet deal for $10/yr.
| weiliddat wrote:
| Is it more small temporary projects you need to make and throw
| away, or large projects you keep working on?
| raybb wrote:
| It's not nearly the same experience, but I'd argue a bit nicer
| of one, I'd recommend giving coolify a shot https://coolify.io/
|
| You have to bring your own server to selfhost but it's dead
| dead easy.
|
| If you have a nodejs app you can basically just click "new
| project from github", select the repo, and click deploy. Then
| it'll be there on your domain (or a free one) and auto redeploy
| any time you push to master.
| qudat wrote:
| Me and a buddy built https://pico.sh to make it easy for
| developers to prototype and share their projects. In particular
| we have a static hosting service (https://pgs.sh) and a tunnel
| service (https://tuns.sh) that should cover most apps in the
| prototype phase.
| curiouser3 wrote:
| glitch.com brings back memories of the pre-slack era Glitch MMO.
| What an amazing time that was, really beautiful game made by
| talented people, pivoted the communication side into what we now
| know as Slack
| duck wrote:
| Why is Glitch and Pocket both shutting down the same day and
| announcing today?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063662
| 42lux wrote:
| Someone is looking for coin and doesn't find it.
| sureIy wrote:
| You may be surprised to find out how many more things are
| happening today! It's definitely a conspiracy.
| weiliddat wrote:
| Sad, one of the first of its kind. Created a bunch of one-off
| tools for friends and colleagues on glitch, but could see why it
| didn't really take off. For me I switched to other platforms like
| codesandbox, replit because the editor UX wasn't great for a long
| time. I get wanting the simplicity angle but having poor
| hints/autocomplete/etc is a hard sell for writing code.
| biker142541 wrote:
| Just coming to say this is a great example of how communication
| should be done for such changes. So many companies get this
| wrong, but this is thoughtful and to the point. Glitch was a
| springboard for myself as well, so very bittersweet (and I guess
| I need to migrate really old stuff... but to their point, this is
| super easy now).
| daveguy wrote:
| This is excellent communication and respect for their users.
| Applause for Glitch. Especially allowing users to retrieve
| resources for a full 6 months after the closure.
|
| If you appreciate this level of communication and respect, avoid
| Digital Ocean at all cost. They will fail to send you emails for
| a few weeks and then delete your resources permanently with no
| recourse. They are the literal opposite of Glitch. Avoid Digital
| Ocean.
|
| I would recommend Glitch remove Digital Ocean from their list of
| alternatives.
| vorador wrote:
| Is this the end of fog creek? I remember they had shut down most
| of their services by the time their rebranded to glitch.
|
| I wonder if anything is left of the company besides Joel's blog
| posts.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Glitch isn't FC either, but to answer your question: is there
| anything left?
|
| Yes, giant piles of money!
| kbrosnan wrote:
| Trello sold to Atlassian. Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow
| sold to Prosus FogBugz sort of lives on at
| https://ignitetech.ai/softwarelibrary/fogbugz but it looks like
| one of those companies that buys software solutions and retains
| the minimum staffing to keep lights on.
| bfdm wrote:
| This a real loss. I'll miss Glitch for rapid experimentation with
| UI and APIs together.
| dmarcos wrote:
| Glitch has been a key piece of the A-Frame community (open source
| project I maintain) for almost a decade. I'm super thankful to
| the team! So many people started programming and had first steps
| in game and 3d graphics development with Glitch.
|
| It's sad to see it go. I was always somehow worried. They had an
| awesome and super generous free tier. Unfortunately, it looks
| they couldn't make the numbers work.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-05-22 23:01 UTC)