BOOTSTRAPPING ★ 64 upvotes 2016

Show HN: Kloudsec, Our Bootstrapped Anycast CDN with LetsEncrypt for Your Site

Retrospective Overview & Key Insights

Distilled analysis of the business dynamics, operational challenges, and strategic takeaways:

Published in 2016, this chronicle by @nubela details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.

Core Principles for Independent Builders:
1
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
2
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
3
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:

The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.

Founder's Discussion Replies (@nubela)

Direct clarifications and follow-up comments shared by the author during the live discussion:

OP @nubela Original Author
2016

Hi everyone, I'm Steven from Kloudsec and we are a 100% bootstrapped startup from Singapore. We built Kloudsec because we wanted to help non-technical website owners find/fix problems.

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Kloudsec boasts a

* A true Anycast CDN network with 3 edge locations (London, Singapore and San Jose, US)

* A LetsEncrypt plugin to automatically add an SSL cert to any domain you have (Just enable the plugin, no programming or webserver tweaking needed)

* Offline protection (No error pages when your site is down, still show static contents)

* Experimental WAF (This is hard to get right, we're working really hard on it)

The CDN and LetsEncrypt is 100% free. The premium security plugins are free for now but will be priced later.

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[Who should use Kloudsec now?]

As we are in beta now, I encourage you start with casual sites that you don't mind trying with a free CDN and SSL certs for HTTPS.

Happy to take on any questions you have :)

Community Discussions & Critical Reviews

High-signal perspectives, counter-arguments, and peer founder insights debated on Hacker News (32 total discussions):

GR @grapehut Peer Contributor

Hey, wow. The site looks really good, so I connected a domain to try it.

Initial feedback: * I spent about 2-3 minutes to trying to find how to get to the main website settings. Only just before giving up I found the "..." which contained it. I think the "Manage your website settings" settings should be prominently displayed.

* All subdomains (and the domain itself) needs to point at the same ip address? This seems to be a pretty big limitation

* This is definitely the most confusing of the UI: https://i.gyazo.com/dc0f848525e98a08944f839aabbea44e.png I thought it was all a single form. I'd break it up a bit better, and when adding a subdomain explain the steps better (aliasing)

* While my ssl certificate is being provisioned, my site is serving a certificate from organkimlan.com I'm guessing that's another one of your customers?

* I love the idea of real time stats, and route-specific feedback (page load time , errors etc).

Some questions:

* What's your content policy in comparison to cloudflares? (That's probably the single biggest thing I like about them)

* Do you have any guides on how your site respects caching? I really love how cloudfront handles this (unlike cloudflare)

* Are you guys able to eat a DDoS? Is this one of the services you're providing?

Anyway, one of the most impressive Show HNs I've seen in a while. I wish you guys great success and will be following closely

NE @newman314 Peer Contributor

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=kloudsec.com

Pretty good but not sure if you need a 4k cert (5651 bytes). That's quite a bit of overhead as well as there shouldn't be a need to send the root cert. Save yourself some traffic. Also, you could probably pare down the cipher list somewhat. The combo of DHE + 4k RSA is probably going to chew up a bunch of CPU unnecessarily.

But pretty nice so far.

TH @thawkins Peer Contributor

Could not get any sensible information about how this works, the dash board preview is almost meaningless marketing gunk, which told me nothing about my site.

I got the impression that it would not cope with anything beyond a simple static site.

DJ @djvdorp Peer Contributor

Is SSL Protection broken currently?

I get this for my domain: 1-Click Encryption FAILED Failed to acquire SSL ceritifate, retrying now..

JJ @jjoe Peer Contributor

Hi

I'm curious, how are you solving the issues inherent in multitenant CDNs like yours (e.g. performance).

Cheers

HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 64 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 32 comments
TOPICS & TECH STACK:
More Retrospectives by @nubela