pockethost.io

So, I was browsing around Github (seriously, who else does this?) when I came across pockethost.io. I’m actively monitoring changes to PocketBase (and its associated projects), so I had to take a look. Turns out, pockethost offers managed hosting for your PocketBase projects.

Sign up was easy - you enter your desired email, password and instance name (don’t use the one generated by default! this is important for later). You’ll get an email asking you to verify your email - click on it, and you’re in. The instance name you chose earlier will be used as the subdomain to access your PocketBase database. For example, if you chose “flaky-grandmother”, you’ll access the PocketBase GUI from https://flaky-grandmother.pockethost.io/_.

From there, it’s pretty much normal PocketBase stuff. I migrated an existing PocketBase instance (hosted on fly.io) to pockethost in… 2 minutes? by using the “Backup and restore your PocketBase data” option (my other instance is hooked up to an S3 bucket - I just restored that backup to this new instance).

So far, so good. Getting started with PocketBase has honestly never been easier. As for pockethost, the docs mention that it’ll probably be a paid service once it reaches v1.0 (something like a free 100 minutes per month). I’m currently self-hosting my primary instance for personal use, but it’s nice to know that all these alternatives exist and that we have options.

Edit: while writing this, something went wrong with the instance (LOL). My data disappeared and I tried to restore it again. It seemed to work - but I wanted to try logging out and logging back in, and was promptly met with an “Invalid login credentials” message (or something to that effect). I refreshed the browser and saw this message:

SQLITE_READONLY: attempt to write a readonly database

Oh well, haha.

Edit 2023-08-16: I went to check on my instances - both are working again, with no intervention from my end. Curiouser and curiouser