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Alexis Ohanian

Fly Custom Hostnames API - A simple API for custom hostnames, handles DNS, SSL, etc.

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Fly Custom Hostnames API is an easy way to enable custom hostnames in apps. If you run an app that hosts content for your customers, use it to give them branded URLs. You get zero maintenance SSL, global edge delivery, and don't have to worry about it breaking like you probably will if you roll your own.

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Kurt Mackey
Maker
Hello Product Hunters — when we started Fly, we figured we'd missed the window of "make SSL easy and the customers will come". Lets Encrypt has changed the game, and we knew a ton of companies rolling their own SSL support with nginx, Traefik, etc, etc. It seemed like a solved problem. It turned out that people were _still_ running into SSL related problems, particularly companies with lots of hostnames pointed at them ... anyone hosting apps/content on behalf of their own customers. They'd all spent a week or so building their own proxy service to host SSL, and none of them felt very comfy when they thought about it. Distributing certificates, keeping them renewed, and — most of all ‚ making https fast is still hard. And it's usually something distracting devs from more important work that's core to their own customers. So this is our way of solving that problem. We can handle any number of hostnames for devs, they can spend all their time not thinking about them and working on what makes their apps special. It's a relatively "simple" use of what we've built, but solves a really fundamental problem for a ton of SaaS companies. It's the most fun thing we've discovered this year.
Brady
@mrkurt Something I just realized yesterday and a great tip for other Makers as well: When you have a product like this; you should also include a "very simple definition" of what your product does. A few reasons this helps: I understand what your product does about 80% and know that very soon I will have a use for it, making my life and developers life easier! The better I understand it, the easier time I have remembering to come back to it when I need it. If there are people here that could use it now or in the future, but they simply do not understand it, they will not know how useful it can be for them. I am fairly certain there are a large number of people on ProductHunt that simply do not understand exactly what some of these "techie" things do 100%, but do not ask. I think there are many products that could benefit a larger group of people, but simply miss the chance because the people seeing them do not fully understand them. Another reason this is coming up for me is that my 5 year old recently started Kindergarten and I have been practicing my ability to explain complicated things in a simplified way, usually involving some sort of analogy! I think that your product is a perfect example of one that could have an analogy along side the advanced "regular" tech definition!
Kurt Mackey
Maker
@bradyoriginal This is a good comment. We've been learning all year how best to explain ourselves to people, the REST API for custom hostnames is actually us getting better at it, but we can definitely do more to explain how we fit in the world.
Brady
@mrkurt - Absolutely, as I said, I understand most of it, but I do know people that like checking things out on here and believe it or not, they don't even understand REST API. I think that it would benefit Producthunt overall to come up with a fun, clever way to describe a lot of these things. IE: Bitcoin is like a $100 dollar bil that you own, but it is split into 1,000 tiny pieces that your friends hold on to until you want to use it and then they put them back together for you when you need it, instead of one bank holding on to one bill. Not sure if that makes sense, since bitcoin is much more than that, but you get the point. The ability to explain FLY-Hostnames to a 5 year old!!!
Benjamin Alijagić
Tried Fly when you guys just launched and as a newbie developer I was super confused about the actual benefits except allowing me to use github pages on subdomains and heroku on main domain. But now with "custom domains + managed SSL for your customers" - well, who doesn't need this! Go fly! 🚀 By the way, when creating a branded hostnames, do I also need to add it to heroku's domains? Also, do I need a wildcard certificate on my side?
Jerome Gravel-Niquet
Maker
@benjam1n Thanks for checking us out a second time! You do not need to add your hostnames to heroku's domains. You don't need a wildcard certificate, we'll generate the certificates for each hostname through Let's Encrypt and renew them automatically for you.
Jerome Gravel-Niquet
Maker
@benjam1n Oh! At their offices? I think I only went there 2-3 times at most. I did go to LessConf a few times though. Small world indeed :)
Alexis Ohanian
Hunter
I love anything that makes things easier for developers. I've known Kurt for awhile now, and I've been impressed with what the team at Fly is building (that's why we invested). Fly Custom Hostnames will enable amazing tools to help creators publish content and build applications. These guys really care for their product, I'm excited to see what people build with this!
Philip Källberg
Looks fantastic, if only I'd seen this 6 months ago when we implemented custom domains using Cloudfront/ACM/Route53... What a headache that was.
Kurt Mackey
Maker
@philip_kallberg We are hearing that a lot. Just remember us if it becomes painful again for some reason. :)
Philip Källberg
@mrkurt of course :) One consideration for us was terminating the SSL on AWS, which is fine as our servers are also on AWS. Wouldn't terminating the SSL with your service mean that the traffic flows unencrypted onwards to the web server, over the Internet?
Kurt Mackey
Maker
@philip_kallberg Nope! We encrypt every hop. There are two options between fly <-> app: 1. Use our agent, this lets you skip running a load balancer entirely (we run our agent alongside each of our app processes): https://fly.io/docs/agents/ 2. Setup ELB with one cert, and then we'll do TLS to ELB. We handle all the custom certs, but you'd still have to manage the one. You should probably be using TLS even within Amazon's network, fwiw. Cross region traffic can route over any number of third parties, depending on how healthy the internet is.