Unfortunately things are moving very slowly in this area. Sandstorm is basically abandoned and Cloudron is not even open source. Bitnami and Yunohost are also major options.
This is untrue. Sandstorm gets monthly releases, and new features tend to show up every couple months or so. Several major improvements to the platform are in the works at the moment. It's definitely true we could use more help, but it's still probably the most secure way to self-host cloud services for personal use.
> Cloudron is not even open source
True, though it's probably the best "successful" approach right now, in that the Cloudron devs have a functional business that allows them to very actively support the platform. (Sandstorm failed here, so as a Sandstorm contributor, I can't really knock their approach.)
> Bitnami and Yunohost are also major options.
Yunohost has zero isolation between applications, a single compromised app can hose your entire server. I would bear that in mind when recommending it widely.
Bitnami is going to leave you mostly on your own to decide how you're going to host it's app packages. I'm not sure it's directly comparable, it's more like a Docker Hub than a managed self-hosting platform.
I'm not recommending any of these; I think it's best to just run services manually - with one VPS, Docker and something like Caddy the pain isn't that large.
It would be great if Sandstorm could get enough attention to thrive because it looked promising, but the activity of the blog¹ doesn't give me much hope. Since 2019 when it announced the hosting was shutting down there have been just 4 posts and apparently no major releases.
We probably should write another blog post or two. We generally try to only post substantial content to the blog, our mailing list tends to have a bit more of the mundane, and of course, our GitHub issues/PRs. Many projects make blog posts for releases, but we generally do not.
For what it's worth, the "just four posts" constitute some major things:
1. Continuing Sandstorm as a community project
2. The 1.0 release of the main app packaging tool
3. Let's Encrypt support built-in
4. A major security improvement in disabling apps from making outgoing HTTP requests without permission
