blog.rchase.com

My $250K acquisition and the start of a Ubiquiti roll-up

This is the story about how I bought our biggest competitor Hubox and migrated all of their customers into the HostiFi platform. I'll share the lessons learned along the way... including why I finally decided to merge instead of run each separately, and how I plan to do

2021 year in review

It's been 3.5 years since I launched HostiFi [hostifi.com] now. Probably the coolest thing that happened this year is the business crossed $1M ARR in September, 10Xing from $100K ARR just 2 years ago. Revenue also exceeded $1M this year for the first time. * Server count

Security

Implementing Tailscale at HostiFi

It's been a year and a half since my last blog post, $374K ARR [https://blog.rchase.com/374k-arr-update/]. I've been keeping busy again! A lot has happened since then. I won't go into all the details, but I want to fix this gap

HostiFi

$374K ARR

It's been 4 months since I wrote a blog post [https://blog.chartmogul.com/firing-customers/]. I've been keeping busy. Today I just feel like I have a lot to say so here's an update about what's on my mind and the challenges

HostiFi

☁️Why we’re reinvesting in our UNMS cloud hosting product

At HostiFi [https://hostifi.net/], we are currently managing support and updates across 780 Ubiquiti servers for our 713 customers, who have connected tens of thousands of devices. The majority of the servers are UniFi, only 81 are UNMS, and we have a handful of UniFi Video servers managed as

HostiFi

💀RIP Ubiquiti UniFi Cloud 2017–2019 (Alternatives)

Yesterday I was searching for “UniFi Cloud Hosting” on Google as I do occasionally to check the organic search ranking for https://hostifi.net, [https://hostifi.net%2C/] and I found out that Ubiquiti had quietly shut down their own UniFi cloud hosting service. So I posted about it on

HostiFi

[Archived] We’re hiring! — Laravel Developer

We are no longer accepting applications for this position. Thank you to everyone who applied! We will follow up with everyone soon. About HostiFi We’re a cloud managed hosting provider specifically for Ubiquiti software. We are currently managing over 600 UniFi and UNMS Linux application servers [https://hostifi.net/

HostiFi Featured

Our Collaboration Tools as a 100% Remote Team of 2

HostiFi [http://hostifi.net/] is a cloud hosting service for Ubiquiti software which, as of today, is managing 660 UniFi and UNMS servers for 599 subscribers and generating $12.5K in monthly recurring revenue. I built it by myself originally and worked alone until recently when I hired Safwan Shaikh

HostiFi Featured

Growing my SaaS from Solo Founder to +1 Employee

I felt I should share my experience with how I’ve been working on systemizing the business processes and delegating work, as it is a common challenge that entrepreneurs face in their journey. Last month I hired Safwan Shaikh, a Technical Support Engineer, as HostiFi [https://hostifi.net/]’s first

HostiFi Featured

How we deployed Duo 2FA for SSH to 600 Ubiquiti servers

HostiFi Update I started HostiFi, a Ubiquiti cloud hosting service [https://hostifi.net/], in May 2018. In January 2019 I went full-time on it, and since then I’ve been sharing monthly updates on website traffic, revenue, and what I’ve been working on at https://rchase.com [https://rchase.

Programming

My git workflow as a solo-developer

I have a confession to make… I’ve launched over a dozen websites, 3 SaaS businesses [https://rchase.com/], and an online community for IT service business owners [https://mspstory.com/], but I’ve never used git (until now). I’ve always just edited the live website. I would make

HostiFi Featured

HostiFi 2.0, Why I’m completely rewriting my $5,735 MRR SaaS

I started HostiFi, a Ubiquiti cloud hosting service [https://hostifi.net/], 1 year ago this month. Since then, it has grown from 0 to $5,735 monthly recurring revenue. 266 paying subscribers are using 309 servers, and have connected a total of over 12,000 Ubiquiti devices! Everything has been

GhostiFi

Micro-SaaS #2, Back to MVP mode

I’ve noticed that when I start making something, it starts out as a simple idea. As I get close to nearing completion of it, my mind wanders with all of the features I could possibly add to it. I begin working on all of those features at once rather

GhostiFi

Micro-SaaS #2, GhostiFi backend complete

I finished writing the entire backend of GhostiFi with only 863 lines of Python. I’m really pushing to launch by December 9, which will be 1 month since I started development. I’ve been feeling this pressure to keep up with Jon Yongfook [https://twitter.com/yongfook] who is

GhostiFi

Micro-SaaS #2, New PoC to code

In my last post, I came up with a plan to fix 2 technical hurdles that I ran into while testing my original solution. In this post, I show how I turned the pseudocode that I wrote in the last post into actual Python. Cloudflare/DNS Fix To solve the

GhostiFi

Micro-SaaS #2, New PoC

In my last post, I wrote about 2 roadblocks that I ran into while developing GhostiFi — my plan was to have instant DNS propagation when changing VPS IP addresses by using Cloudflare as a proxy, and to use Vultr snapshots as the basis for backing up/restoring/migrating OpenVPN servers.

GhostiFi

Micro-SaaS #2, Technical hurdles

While testing server.rebuild_now(), I ran into some  high level problems, which kind of disrupted the technical foundation of the entire project. I think I can make some solutions for them, but this is definitely the biggest roadblock that I’ve hit so far with GhostiFi. Up until now,

GhostiFi

Micro-SaaS #2, Destroy and rebuild functions

In this post, I will be sharing how I turned the server.destroy() and server.rebuild_now() pseudocode into actual Python. server.destroy() This function is triggered when a user cancels their subscription. It’s a very simple function, which consists of 5 “mini” functions: _destroy_vps() — Destroys the VPS

GhostiFi

Micro-SaaS #2, Python Threading

As promised in my initial blog post, I am continuing to write about the entire development process of GhostiFi [https://www.indiehackers.com/product/ghostifi], from concept, to sketch, to pseudocode, to actual code. In this post, I will be showing how I turned the threading pseudocode into actual Python.

GhostiFi

Micro-SaaS #2, GhostiFi server_check.py

In this post I am sharing how I’ve integrated a WordPress SaaS subscription [https://easydigitaldownloads.com/downloads/recurring-payments/] frontend with my Python backend for GhostiFi [https://ghostifi.net/], a VPS VPN service that I am building. I query the database from Python once every minute on a cron and

GhostiFi

Micro-SaaS #2, GhostiFi database

In this post I create the database for GhostiFi’s [https://ghostifi.net/] server table in MySQL, and begin writing server.py by defining SQLAlchemy [https://www.sqlalchemy.org/] classes for Server and Subscription tables. In the end, I was able to do a few queries on them using the

GhostiFi

Micro-SaaS #2, GhostiFi MVP

In this post, I’ve written out the entire database schema and every single function of the GhostiFi [https://ghostifi.net/] MVP in pseudocode. It describes exactly how I plan to be able to make my sketch of the product interface come to life as a real application. GhostiFi is

GhostiFi

Micro-SaaS #2, GhostiFi

I launched my first SaaS business, HostiFi [https://hostifi.net/], in May 2018 and since then it has grown from 0 to $2,000 MRR [https://www.indiehackers.com/product/hostifi] providing UniFi controller hosting [https://hostifi.net/] to over 100 paying customers. During that time, I also had the

HostiFi

My First Micro-SaaS, Started with a car crash

It took a close call to remind me that life is fragile, and death may come earlier than expected. I didn’t want to die with regrets that I hadn’t tried hard enough to pursue my dreams.

HostiFi

My First Micro-SaaS, Building the MVP

In this post, I will share how I built the MVP for https://hostifi.net, a UniFi controller hosting platform.