I have been thing a lot about why none of those self-hosting solutions never took off and most of them died off over the last decade.

Why are we going dehydrated in the middle of the ocean, with docker and so many open source alternative to the common software and services ?

My conclusion is this: just pick the distro you like, whether it is Debian, Fedora, Arch or FreeBSD. Preferably one with the selection of package you need. All those will be maintained in a few years too, you just need to upgrade.

Because in the end the solution was the problem. A Debian for example was meant to host Internet services, it is well put together and has a large selection of software and can be trusted. It is more than enough security features for hosting your own apps, especially if you access them through something like tailscale.

A lot of people (me included) thought that since containers were the hype we should build something new and setup everything like a corporation would do. Looking back it was a bad idea and it did not work (fact).

> It is more than enough security features for hosting your own apps, especially if you access them through something like tailscale.

But part of the whole point of Sandstorm and its ilk was that we could have so much better security. Sandboxing all the services really is better than what we're getting now.

I for one use Cloudron.io . Paying customer for 6 years.

> So I would ask for recommendations on similar tools. Not bare Docker containers but fully lanaged platforms wirh one click installs where it is easy to add/remove users.

I've done a similar journey for my self-hosted stuff, started with Sandstorm, moved to Yunohost, but got frustrated with the configuration, and how different every package was and eventually have landed on using NixOS for my home servers. It's not a "fully managed platform" in the traditional sense, but if you're a developer, that's almost what you get. Adding new services is usually just adding the configuration for them.

Bit of a learning curve learning the language, tooling and ecosystem, but once you're over that hurdle, having all declerative configuration in SCM together with easy linking of configuration options together (define service ports once, reference them in other services, for example), and everything being easy to rollback, have been a god-send so far. Been running it for maybe 2 years or something by now, with more or less zero issues besides the ones I introduce myself.

Adding/removing users can be as easy as adding/remove one line of configuration, and redeploying. Simple enough for me and my family so far.

For Sandstorm alternatives with one-click installs and user management, consider Cloudron, Caprover, Umbrel, Unraid, TrueNAS SCALE apps, or Portainer with its app templates - most allow running alongside other services without monopolizing your server.

I’ve been using Caprover for the last 4-5 years, and it’s great for my purposes.

It sounds like the OP may be looking for something that can be provisioned for multiple users, which Caprover doesn’t really have facility for. That said, the one-click-app templates are very easy to read/edit/update/create, if you can create a Docker Compose spec, you can create a template for Caprover.

I like that it’s really just a frontend for Docker, all of its functions are built around standard API calls to Docker. It means that I can install Portainer as a one-click-app, and use it to manage all of my other apps, without sacrificing any features. I can also spin up Docker containers outside of Caprover, and as long as I don’t run into port conflicts, it functions exactly as it should.

Caprover is just a one-man-show, so development may not be as responsive or rapid as some may wish, but the maintainer is very active, and he responds to pull requests promptly. One Click App templates are largely community maintained, but since they’re so easy to deal with, it’s trivial to work around most common issues, like updating versions or exposing new environment variables, and once again, the maintainer is very good about merging pull requests for app templates.

I loved the idea of Sandstorm as well, but ended up moving my stuff to Proxmox and TurnKey Linux. TKL is a similar idea to Sandstorm, but on the container level, so what you download are LXC images, ready to go after a minimum of user-friendly configuration. They are going since 2008, and they have around 120 offerings.

TKL is integrated into Proxmox, so for example if you'd like a new Wordpress site or a Nextcloud or Mattermost instance, you just click a bunch on the web interface, it downloads the image and installs and runs it, you do the initial setup my giving it a bunch of info on a user interface, and the thing is ready to go.

There are lots — “selfhosted OS” is the term to look for. Umbrel and CasaOS are some other popular ones. I don’t personal experience with any of them though.

There also used to be Freedom Bone [https://gitlab.com/bashrc2/freedombone] ...but, honestly, I've never used it nor am even sure if its still alive as a project.