I’ve seen some old topics on this, but nothing recent or that go into detail. So here are my thoughts after using it for a couple of months…
Sandstorm is well worth checking out as it makes self hosting significantly easier. Many self hosting platforms are out there, but in my view Sandstorm is the most promising one.
You can host Sandstorm on your own hardware, on a 3rd party server, or pay sandstorm.io for the service (I’m doing this at the moment).
Once up and running, installing an application is very very simple - comparable to installing a mobile app. More over, there is built in isolation between apps, and even between instances of the same app. The end result (if the platform works as its supposed to) is a much better user experience, when compared to signing up to multiple separate web services, and security, when compared to hosting multiple services on a single server. Its a little bit like signing into Google and having all your apps there, except that you are in more control.
However, not taking any thing away from the benefits of the Sandstorm, there are still issues with this platform. Unless you are a sys admin, installing the platform yourself is probably not a good idea. And if you’re reliant on a stack of web applications running on Sandstorm, then you should leave the upgrades, backups etc to someone who knows how to do it. Moreover, self-hosting is always limited by your upload speeds and ISP reliability, meaning that the best option, and the one that the vast majority of people will choose, is to pay sandstorm.io to host their webapps and data.
Sandstorm makes open source web apps easy and cheap to use, and its bring them to a greater audience, which is great. However, because Sandstorm still needs to be install on a server, and maintained, it still leaves data in the hands of a 3rd party.
Anyone else use this platform?
