I love PikaPods, which is LowEndTalk member @m4nu’s project.  It’s a cool service where you pick apps and they host them (“pods”) on their fabric.  It’s incredibly easy to use and they support a wide range of applications.

True, our DIY-focused community would often get a VPS and host these things themselves, but there is no denying the “it just works” factor.  In my experience, even if an application has a GitHub with Docker instructions, there can still be a period of debugging and tweaking until things work right.  PikaPods does all that work for you, and in my experience (2 years now), it’s been very reliable.

New Apps Added!

They recently added a slew of new apps:

• Activepieces: Workflow automation tool with 200+ integrations. Similar to Zapier.
• Blinko: Note tool with AI retrieval to quickly capture and organize your fleeting thoughts.
• ByteStash: Store, organise, and manage your code snippets in one secure place.
• Discourse: A discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. Use it as a mailing list, discussion forum, long-form chat room, and more!
• Hoarder: A bookmark-everything app (links, notes and images) with AI-based automatic tagging and full text search.
• Snipe-IT: Asset management for IT departments. Helps to track hardware, licenses and accessories.
• Storyteller: Platform to combine ebooks and audiobooks for creating and reading ebooks with synced narration.

They’ve got almost 100 apps now, including solutions for blogging, media management, developing, monitoring, finance, dashboards, file sharing, forums, password management, and more.  A lot of them can be run for $1-2 per month.

You can also dial up/down resources (cpu, memory, disk), host on your own domain, and use SFTP to enter your pod if you need to tweak or export.

And Now S3 Backups, Too!

PikaPods has always backed up your Pods.  But a lot of us lowenders like to have our own.  Previously, you could do this via SFTP.

Now they’ve added S3 backups.  Using AWS, iDrive, Backblaze, or your own MinIO (😍), PikaPods can backup using Restic, which uses incremental, encrypted, deduplicated and compressed snapshots.  It’s compatible with Cloudflare R2 as well.

PikaPods has been going from strength to strength, adding new apps and new features at regular intervals.  If you want “it just works” for apps or want to try out apps before you roll your own, they are definitely work a try.

Start FREE With a $5 Welcome Credit!

Head over to PikaPods and signup, and they’ll give you $5 to try out the service.  No promo code needed.

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.