 I talk a lot on this channel about Unify. As many of you know, I'm a big fan of their products. They work excellent, especially we love their access points and switches. But one of those things about Unify and their software is free to download, their software-defined network controller that manages all these devices is a free piece of software, but you do have to run it somewhere. You're responsible for the server it runs on, you're responsible for the hardware, you're responsible to maintain the updates on it. And that's fine. I don't have a problem doing this myself, but for some people, maybe they're looking for an easier way to do it. Now I've helped people set this up in like digital ocean, line out in different places, or even Amazon, wherever they wanna run their own controller. Or you could also look at getting a Cloud Key, which I just recently reviewed, which is also a great choice for the Unify software comes preloaded with there from Unify and has some automatic options. Then there's another option that I ran to. And it's started out as me looking for an easy way to have everything from the Let's Encrypt Cert, auto account generation, and an easy way to manage clients. And we do run our own controller for our managed clients, but I wanted a way that we could basically automate the deployment of this. And it turned out that was a kind of a challenge to write. We started just looking at all me and my friend Phil, who has been on a channel before, he's expert at a lot of automation and design. We've seen some of the challenges in doing it and we've played around with some scripts. And I started doing the market research before you get into a product. And I came up with Hostify as one of the people already doing it out there. And I see people because I'm specifically talking about Riley Chase. And I won't spend too much time on this, but I'll leave a link to it. I think a lot about who runs the company and Riley did something that I kind of wish I would have done when I started my company back in 2003. He has blogged about the entire journey of starting a business from leaving his job to starting up his software as a service company, Hostify. And it's kind of cool that he did all this. Like I said, just one of the things I found even more interesting was it wasn't just I found some company that was creating a software service product called Hostify for the Unify Cloud Hosting. It's that he has the entire including how much revenue comes in from there. This is not profit. This is revenue, by the way, for those of you wondering. But he talks about the costs of running a service, the methodologies and the thoughts he has behind the service he runs. And I thought this was kind of a cool thing. And I also reached out to Riley and we had some great conversation. He's definitely a very motivated, very innovative entrepreneur. Now let's go back to talking about the product itself. Launch Unify in the Cloud. This is pretty well done. I've been playing with this. I created the paid account. I created a free account and tested how each one gets created. He's spent a lot of time thinking about this and it's what I would have done. They have all the nice, clean website with all the features and everything else on there. And the short answer is this will create a hosted multi-site Unify and automate all of the functions for you in colluding something, let's encrypt cert, auto renewing the let's encrypt cert, and creating automatic updates for everything. So you don't have to say, oh no, there's another update. I gotta get around to doing that. That's all scripted and taken care of on the backend. Plus he provides support and help and he's very much familiarized himself with the way the database in the backend of Unify works. So that's been very interesting. So monthly, these are prices as of July, 2019. Prices can change. So always refer back to the website, not my video because the video becomes static. But 125 devices at $19 per month, 250 at 29, it's not awful and you get a yearly plan for 15% discount. So the pricing on it is very reasonable. I know it's really cheap right now to spin up like a digital ocean droplet and put it in there. But yeah, remember, what is your time worth because you have to maintain and update that. And we've learned to people who, we just had someone had a problem. They were numerous versions behind me because they didn't have it set up to properly update. They didn't have what's encrypted and installed or anything, but all the updates and everything you're behind on. So if you want to have someone else take care of that, hostifies a pretty cool option. And one of the other things I like, if you wanna try it out for free, there's a free plan that does not require a credit card. That is something I think is really cool is anytime a company lets you check out a free plan and not charging you any type of money. And what they, what he did for the free plan was just set up a max one site or 25 devices. For home users wanna get started with Unify, looking for a simple place to host it, can't go wrong. If you ever get bigger and wanna expand to more than 25 devices, which probably is more than you'll have in your house, but who knows, you will end up, you know, buying the bigger plan. So everything else is pretty simple. Now, how does it work? How do you create it? Well, let's get over there. And I'm gonna show you what it looks like when it creates, including my password. And I say that because I wanted to actually show you the screen and how it creates. So my free Unify site is done. I tried the paid one and deleted it. And then I tried the free one. They both work. Just like I said, I walk through both steps on this. With the free one here, here's the launch. It actually gave me PZera1.hostify.net. So you get a prefix on it. That's gonna be your informed URL, the username I chose, and it generates a password, a temp password. As soon as you log in, it prompted me to change your password. But once you're logged in, for the most part, it's pretty much the same that you'll see for Unify installation. With the exception of when you do the free one, you're going to not have the multi-site option because that has been disabled. So that's the one thing about the free one. There are some restrictions on there, but you still can add 25 devices. You just can't set up the multi-site version of it on there. So other than that feature being missing, the SSL's installed, and we don't have a little red X. We actually have a proper valid certificate. So it's at P1.hostify. It's using Let's Encrypt, and it's all set to auto update, which is wonderful. I set up a wireless network, and then I adopted this guy right here. So I have the Unify HD in there. Now it works fast, so we'll go ahead and hit locate. And it pretty much instantly, if you can see it blinking within, I don't know, was that one second, two seconds? From the time I hit locate till the time it started making this blink. So the communications is really fast to everything else, and you're done. It's a simple set up Unify controller. Now I will comment, and I'll leave a link to this, but if you don't know, when you do a set and form on these, you do have to have your set and form URL, and my inform URL would have been this, P01.hostify.net. So really straightforward to set up, really easy to spin this up. When I had adopted a couple devices, deleted them, adopted them, I was playing around with it. It's snappy, it's fast, it was really trouble free. The whole set up was like, no problem at all. And being here in my office, it notices all the other stuff, all the other wifi networks. So it's like, I go into the menus on here. It's actually quite a fast controller, so you just put the time into setting up the backend properly and everything else. And I did ask a lot of questions. I had a great conversation with them, including I wanna know what he's using for payments, and how is he handling it, how is he tokenizing the billing? He followed best practice. Everything was like, you know, set up with a straight backend. And those little things kind of mattered to me when I'm, you know, before I put my credit card in on something. And I told him I was gonna go ahead and stick my credit card in here and walk through the process because I don't like recommending a product unless I've done a little bit of testing with it. So overall, my impressions of Hostify were, it's a simple solution for those people who go, I don't wanna maintain any of this. And maybe, you know, if we maintain it as a service for clients, without giving them access to the control panel, like we do take over Wi-Fi for people to manage it, but there's those in between people, those home users, or even small businesses, they go, you know, I kind of want my own dashboard and paying a few dollars a month to have someone else update and maintain all this infrastructure for me. That'd be great. And I tell you, for some of them, I'm gonna really recommend this to at least a handful of people that are one-off because every time they call us, they're way out of date. There are a lot of versions behind. And I try to recommend, please keep all these things up to date. If you're not going to pay us, at least, you know, this is a good happy in between, I think, for people who wanna maintain and have their own dashboard and have something auto update. Full disclosure, I do have, but you're not required to use it at all. An offer code that does help out the channel on our affiliates page for Hostify, and I'll leave a link below in this video. But my overall impressions are it's a neat service. I wanna look at some of the other services that he's offering, because he's got some cool concepts. He's really trying to build the business up. And if you are just an entrepreneur in general and wanna read about some of the entrepreneurial process, he's got some good write-ups on there. You know, even myself, a longtime business owner, I was like, oh, cool. This is, I almost like, wish I would have started in 2003 talking about my entrepreneurial and divergent experiences, because there's always a lot of lessons learned when you're very open about things. And hopefully, you know, you don't make some of the mistakes that you make when you're a new entrepreneur. I mean, mistakes are not just mistakes. They're often expensive mistakes. And some people won't survive some of those mistakes when starting a business. So how are you doing well? I'm excited and it's cool that he keeps posting every month how much recurring revenue. The goals he's got set, I think these are kind of cool things about the openness. And he's very responsive. So I had questions about a few things and he's very, replies right away to start things out. So I'm already got the impression that you get really good support on this. A few people I've seen people talk about reviewing this and have asked me about it. That's the other reason I'm reviewing this, it seems like a pretty good service. And after speaking with him, reading through his blog post and everything, everything I like it about it may not be something I personally use because we manage your own controller. But for those people who go, you know, I want to have a dashboard and want to auto update, I think it's a great value. And like I said, I have an affiliate offer. We always have actually a lot of affiliate offers. I wanted to bring that up. Ways to keep this channel is minimal amount of ads and sponsored placements as possible. By the way, this is not at all sponsored. I just reached out to him because I thought it was a cool product, but we do have an affiliate link. So full disclosure. But we have a few other things we have affiliate links for too. So if you want to run it yourself in line node or digital ocean, we have that. And we have an Amazon affiliate link if you want to buy the products to our link. It always does help out the channel. I do appreciate it. But yeah, that's my thoughts on Hostify. I thought it was a neat product and I wanted to share that with you guys. Thanks. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. If you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content, hit that subscribe button and the bell icon and maybe YouTube will send you a notice when we post. 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