I’ve been wanting to give PikaPods a spin ever since we interviewed their founder.  The one-sentence summary of PikaPods is: packaged apps on individual containers and you pay by the app.

I wanted to give Monica a spin.  It’s a “personal CRM” where you can track relationships.  You can sign up for the project’s hosting but it’s $9/month.  It’s not difficult to setup and host yourself, but wants PHP 8 and I’m lazy.  And I wanted to try PikaPods.  And I’m lazy.

What I hadn’t counted on was the addictive nature of PikaPods!  Just go to their available apps and browse.  I discovered several apps I’d never heard of and they’re all just a click away.

The way PikaPods work is that they spin up the container and then provide a unique URL to you, like some-random-phrase.pikapod.net.  If you wish, you can then alias this to something on your own custom domain (i.e., a CNAME record pointing from monica.example.com to some-random-phrase.pikapod.net).  This is optional and you do not need your own domain to make use of PikaPods.  Since ultimately it’s going to end up as a browser bookmark anyway, I haven’t bothered.

You can dial up resources as you need them, so if you’re running a forum (such as Flarum) or a blog (Ghost, Haven), database (NocoDB, Baserow), etc. you can scale things up as work and users grow.

And of course, there is one app that everyone in the community needs:

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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