We in SashiDo, strongly believe in the “no vendor lock-in” policy. We want our customers to stay with us because they like the service we are providing, not because they are hostages of a proprietary software. We are providing managed Mobile Backend as a Service using Parse Server (open source backend engine) and our mission is to give to the mobile developers the easiest and cost-effective way to create functional and beautiful apps. We take care of apps’ infrastructure, scaling, security, database maintenance, backups, and Parse Server deployment to give the developers the time and energy to focus on their business idea.

We are really passionate about Parse Server, and we are here to give you 5 reasons why you should consider using Parse Server and SashiDo for your backend.

1. MBaaS providers retire or discontinue products, open source Parse Server is here to stay.

Companies come and go. Just recently Telerik (a Progress company) decided to discontinue yet another MBaaS, forcing their clients to completely rewrite their code. And there’s absolutely no guarantee that this will not happen again. It’s not hard to imagine just how much additional expenses will occur to all Telerik Platform clients. Of course they have their official alternative provided by Progress - Kinvey, but the new platform is so different that they will have to spend months in order to get their apps up and running in the new platform causing a huge delay in their current roadmap. And who will compensate them? No one.

Open Source Parse Server is a completely different story. It gives you vendor independence or how we like to call it “no vendor lock-in”. There are already several companies that offer Managed Parse Server hosting - SashiDo, Buddy, Back4App and more. Event if one of them decides to pivot or discontinue its offerings, the others will stay. And that’s not all - if you are unsatisfied with one company, you can always migrate to another (often free of charge) without rewriting your code. Or you can choose to host your app in your own Parse Server setup in Heroku or Digital Ocean. Basically, you have plenty of options none of which will drain your development budget which definitely makes the Open Source Parse Server more attractive than any proprietary MBaaS on the market.

2. Using Open Source Parse Server will reduce your business risk.

Open Source Parse Server is the better choice if you planning long-term projects. Migration from one MBaaS to another will always come with additional expenses for development. And sometimes these expenses can go as much as the original development cost for your app.

Choosing Parse Server will guarantee you that you’ll never be forced to migrate to another backend solution. Even if one Parse Server hosting provider disappears you will always be able to move your app to another provider or get the public source code and host it on your own servers. Your app can live as long as you want without the need for unanticipated budget allocation for development.

3. Parse Server community is independent from any financial decision.

Parse Server is maintained by developers with the common goal to make it better and feature-rich for other fellow app developers to use. Everybody can contribute to the open source project and the decisions about what feature to develop next are based solely on what the developers need.
On the other hand, companies that offer a proprietary backend solution often prioritize new features development based on how much money they will be able to make out of them. And sometimes if a certain feature is not considered as profitable enough to make sane to be developed - it’s never started.

4. Open Source projects have less prerequisites for hacker attacks and data leaks.

Cyber security is no joke these days. We witness major data breaches even from big companies too often to think there’s no way this can happen to us.
Companies that provide proprietary software often rely on security through obscurity principle, meaning that if no one outside the company know the exact implementation then the code is secure.

Almost every data breach is caused by human mistakes. Unfortunately humans do make mistakes and security through obscurity principle may seems to cover up these mistakes nicely. The truth however, is that the nowadays hackers are capable of finding exploits even when the source code is not available for them to use.
No project is protected from human mistakes, not even the open source one. But what makes open source more secure, is the way how open source communities work.

First, the project’s code is out there for everybody to see. Everybody who is interested, can evaluate the code and if they see a vulnerability or just small bug in the code they can suggest a fix. Instead of being automatically applied, this fix is send as suggestion for the people involved with the project. They review it and accept it only when they are sure the quality of the solution meets the project requirements. Finally, when a solution is accepted, it is merged with the master branch of the open source project and the fix is available for everybody to use immediately. This makes the time between identifying a possible security breach and distributing a fix way shorter in the open source projects than in the proprietary software.

Although we haven’t witnessed major data leak caused by a MBaaS provider yet, it’s not a guarantee that will not happen in the future. And if you are afraid that your data may go in the wrong hands, it’s better to trust what you can see for yourself, than what others claim, but no one can see for sure.

5. Many hosting options for Parse Server create pricing competition.

If you are using a closed source MBaaS, provided by just one company, and you know that you’ll spend thousands of dollars for development to migrate to another MBaaS, you’ll accept some percentage of price increasing as long as it’s not too drastic. It’s not exactly monopoly, but the result is almost the same.
On the other hand, if you’re using Open Source Parse Server, you can switch providers at no development cost. When your provider increases its pricing, you have the power to decide whether this increase is reasonable or not and to take action to migrate elsewhere if necessary.

Open Source Parse Server is cool and the list with the benefits you will have with it does not end here. The truth is that it has something to offer to everyone. And we can all agree here, there’s nothing better than having provider alternatives because competition makes the world go round.

Let’s start with the basics.

GitHub is a software development platform that lets you host and develop your code, manage projects, and collaborate with other developers. Your repository (repo) is the place where your project lives. GitHub allows repos to be public, where everyone can view or access the code, or private, where only the repo owner and the collaborators have access to the code.

Normally, if you want to use a private repo in GitHub, you need to have a paid subscription, but in SashiDo every app comes with a private repo, created by us, so you don’t need to pay additional fees. [How cool is that :)]

If you are new to GitHub, it’s important to understand the key concepts behind it and how our integration works in order to fully take advantage of all its benefits.

When you create an app in SashiDo, we automatically create a private GitHub repo for your app and Cloud Code. When you connect your GitHub account with SashiDo you will receive an email from GitHub saying that @parsegroundapps [this is us] has invited you to collaborate on the parsegroundapps/pg-app-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx repository. Don’t forget to click “View Invitation” in your email and then accept the invitation.

When you click to activate your cloud code your repo will look like this:

(Note that if you only see readme.md in your repo, this means that you haven’t activated your cloud code from SashiDo dashboard yet)

You can see two folders - cloud and public. It is important not to rename these two as they are prerequisite for your app to work in SashiDo.

• Your cloud folder is where your have to put your Cloud Code
• Your public folder is where you can host your static files (html, css, js files, images etc.) Yes, you can use SashiDo to host your website too.

The next step is to make sure you understand how GitHub flow works. Sooner or later you will need to develop new features or do code changes without causing downtime for your app, so make sure you are familiar with branches and how to create them.

• You can use as many development branches as you need in order to organize your development process. Our recommendation is to use at least one.
• As for your master branch - this is your “official” code base and where your cloud code is built from. Every time you commit changes to the master branch you trigger a deploy in SashiDo! This means that if you’re not careful and commit buggy changes in your master branch this will immediately affect your app customers.

Other useful tutorials you’ll need to check out if you’re not familiar with GitHub are Mastering Issues and How to document your projects.

There’s no real fun in developing code by yourself so if you want colleagues of yours to be able to do changes in your code - you need to add them as collaborators. This simply can be done through your SashiDo dashboard - just add them as app collaborators and they will receive an invitation to the app repository through GitHub.

Now you’ve mastered the basics of GitHub and you’re ready to work on your app.
You can check this video if you need more information about Cloud Code or you may continue with this tutorial on Advanced Cloud Code integration on SashiDo.

Happy Coding!

No matter if you are an independent developer or a manager of an app agency, you should always consider structuring your accounts in SashiDo in a way that will reflect your development process best.

Actually, it’s not only the development process that matters when creating accounts in SashiDo, but also the security factor. It’s really important to think how to protect yourself and your intellectual property in cases of a “bad will” actions from an employee or a partner, because … unfortunately such things happen sometimes.

So let’s start with the basics.

There are two types of SashiDo accounts - one is an app owner, one is a collaborator.

• What makes one account an app owner is that it has apps and has added a credit card to pay for these apps.

• The collaborator account is just an account that can be invited to work on specific apps by their app owners. This type of account doesn’t need to enter payment details as all bills for the apps are handled by their owners.

Important things to mention here are:
Only the app owner can:

• Pay for the app
• Delete the app
• Ask for a transfer to another account
• Add or remove collaborators
• Turn on/off Automatic Database Backups
• Manage Engine setup

Also invoices and emails regarding payment failure will be sent only to the account’s email and to the billing email if provided in the payment method.

Both app owners and collaborators can:

• Manage the database
• Manage the cloud code
• Send push notifications
• Restore backups
• Do everything that is related to the app development and maintenance.

Before you register in SashiDo to create an app (or migrate one from other Parse Server) you should think about what email you want to use for this account. Does the email belong to an employee who has a chance to quit at some point? Is it an email that a lot of people can access, hence can change the password to SashiDo and steal or delete your apps? Is it an email that you read frequently or it’s just a dummy email no one keeps an eye on?

The best and secure way is to choose an email that only the most trusted people in the company will have access to. You can even create a special email for the purpose of registering a SashiDo account, but you should check this email regularly (or forward it to someone) as we may occasionally send you important information regarding your app.

One other thing you want to think about is how you are going to bill your clients.

• If you prefer to send your clients an overall invoice for development and hosting you may prefer to have all your apps regardless of who your client is under the same SashiDo account. This way you will receive just one invoice from us, meaning less transactions and less stress for your accountant.
• But if you wish to re-send the invoices from SashiDo and bill your clients separately for the development, you may prefer to have separate account for each of your clients. Even better - you may ask your client to create a SashiDo account, and enter their credit card details so you’ll not need to re-send invoices each month. Just remember that only the app owner can add collaborators, so every time you’ll want to add a new employee on the project you’ll have to ask them to do it for you.

When you finalize your decision about the account’s ownership it’s time to think about your employees. Remember, the collaborators accounts are free, so there’s no need to share a username and password between employees. Just ask all your developers or freelancers to create their own SashiDo accounts. This way you will have a better control over who’s working on an app, and will have an easy way to fully revoke access to someone if necessary.

What about the GitHub integration?

When you create an app in SashiDo, we create a private repo for this app and send a GitHub invitation to the app owner. And when the app owner adds or removes collaborators in SashiDo, their respective GitHub accounts (when linked) are invited or removed as collaborators to this private repository.

Two more things worth mentioning here:

• a SashiDo account can be linked with only one GitHub account

• one GitHub account can be used only for one SashiDo account.

This basically means that if your company is already using GitHub, the best way to structure your SashiDo accounts is by mirroring your structure from GitHub. Doing so, you’ll have an easy way to manage your employees and ensure security as well.

No matter how you decide to structure your company accounts, the most important thing is to feel comfortable with the current setup. Knowing that you created a strong foundation for your company to do business and grow is really an empowering feeling. But if you, at some point, decide that the structure you created is not suitable for you anymore, or you haven’t put much thought about it before - don’t worry! You can always rearrange it by requesting app transfers or account’s email changes. Just send us a support ticket through your app dashboard and we will help you organize your accounts in the way you want!

Happy Coding!

Last month was SashiDo's first exhibition at a conference - we attended Webit Festival Europe's Founders Games. We were very proud to be one of the 100 selected startups among 2400+ to exhibit and pitch in front of well-known experts and investors during Europe's premier digital and tech festival.

Our mission was to spread the word about Parse Server and Open MBaaS but we knew it would be hard to explain what our service is about to a diverse audience consisting of more than 5k attendees from 90 countries. We knew it would be even harder to do it in a fun way that we would enjoy to the maximum. Being an IT infrastructure startup, there's not much to show to the people passing by our booth, so we decided to go a little bit wild and show them what they are able to do with SashiDo.

After a funny brainstorming session, we decided to create an app that interacts with the visitors to the booth and helps them command a custom made IoT candy box (YES! A BOX FULL OF DELICIOUS CANDIES!).

After a few days of hard work from our programmers, this candy box idea came to live, and it was awesome. The hardest part was building the actual candy box that would open and close on command, and they managed to make it only with materials found in general stores.

The app that had to communicate with the candy box, of course, was created using SashiDo's back-end as a service and was showing how easy it is to create all kind of apps, even ones that interact with IoT devices.

As for the candies - you can never go wrong with them :) and during the event, we grabbed a great amount of attention from all kind of people - experts in various fields, speakers, VCs and fellow entrepreneurs. From technical to non-technical people, everyone was delighted to see how the candy box opened on their command and everyone left knowing what we think was the most important thing to remember about us - Service that empowers you to create all kind of apps (sometimes even crazy candy boxes) fast.

We did more than 200 demos and talked with a lot of interesting people. We created a lot of new friendships and connections, but most importantly we brought a little piece of sweetness to everyone who stopped by. And thanks to all these people and their positive comments we do believe that we are on the right way and the best is yet to come!

In summary

We gave away about 4kg of candies and for us they equaled roughly 20 hours of happiness. That was the amount of time we spent at our booth talking and having fun with all the attendees. 4 Kilos of candies! Cool, right? And to those, who count every calorie, we probably gave a good reason to go jogging on the next day.

We are looking forward to the next big event (fingers crossed). Meanwhile, we will continue to do our best to delight our customers with awesome new features and stable service.

When considering where to host an application, no size fits all needs. To determine the best location, you have to consider many factors and cases but one of the most important criterion you must satisfy is the physical proximity of your target market.

In today's crowded marketplace, the good user experience is a game changer, and apps with perfect user experience are rewarded with happy and loyal users. The most common reason for users to complain and abandon an app is loading time - consumers have grown incredibly impatient and speed is of essence when it comes to the overall experience while interacting with a piece of software.

Intuitive UI that’s easy on the eye, solid, quality code, etc. are indeed important, however what app developers should also be focusing on is how fast is the data transfer between the users and the servers.

When a user request information through your app (loading a user account, or another piece of information stored on your servers), this information has to travel from your server location to your user's device passing between several networks via internet exchange points (ISPs) and switches. The physical distance between your server and the user, as well as the number of ‘hops’ between networks will affect the speed, at which your app loads and runs. Although nowadays the internet connections are quite good, communicating between different continents can create a significant delay.

Benchmarks

Here are the benchmarks that we did in our regions in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

These numbers prove the need of different server regions for different target markets.

As you can see, there are some significant differences in the speed when you are requesting information that is stored close to the point where you are located.

In other words, if the majority of an app users are located in let's say Seoul, then it would be best for this particular app to be hosted in the Asia region. Of course, it is true that users from other, more distant areas, would have to wait a bit longer for every data transfer if they want to use the same app but you would be catering to your core user base. This way you will achieve a much higher customer satisfaction level, which on its end leads to higher adoption and retention rates.

Selecting your app's server location is an important decision that you have to take based on your target market(s) but we promise that being close to your customers (both metaphorically and literally) will pay off.

This said, now seems to be a good time to mention that today we are launching our new regions Australia and Asia so you can have more options to choose from and host your apps in the heart of your markets.

If you need advice for your particular target market, please do contact us at support@sashido.io or via our live chat. We will be happy to help!

Last week we asked you to guess the new feature we've been working on lately. The correct answer is: we are launching two new regions - Australia and Asia - by the end of the month.

Today's demanding clients do feel the difference of speed regarding app usability. An improvement in the loading time is a pretty good reason for more positive reviews on the app stores, and let's be honest, the positive reviews are the currency of the app development market.

We know it's crucial for you to be located as close as possible to your users in order to give them the best possible user experience, so we are providing you with these two new options to choose where to host your app's data.

We will be ready to migrate apps in the new regions by the end of the month (April 21) and until then you can reserve a spot there. As a starter, these new locations will be very limited - only a hundred apps per region - so hurry up and secure a place for your app in advance.

You can reserve a spot in the new regions from your app's dashboard in New Regions section. From there you will be able to see the prices that apply to these new locations as well.

On April 21, we will proceed with the migrations, and when it’s time for your app, we will contact you via email to walk you through the process and to schedule the most convenient time for action.

Meanwhile,
Happy coding!

Easter is around the corner, and we decided to create a little Easter hunt for our customers.

We will give one of you the chance to win a $15 credit for SashiDo :)

All you need to do is guess what’s the new feature we’ve been working on lately.

We promise it’s really hot!

The winner will be drawn from those who have correctly named the new feature in our comment section below, so don’t forget to check it regularly for updates.

HINT: It is something that will bring your app closer to your customers.

We are so happy that many of you suggested an answer (some of you even the correct one) and we decided there will be two winners.

That’s right! Two of you will receive a $15 credit for SashiDo :)

We will give you one more day to share your suggestions.

Submit your answer until April 8, (18:30 UTC+3). On April 10, (18:30 UTC+3) our sales rep Tanya will announce the two lucky winners.

The competition is now closed!

We want to thank you all for taking part in our game and for the nice comments and suggestions. Your feedback is very important for us, so our dev team will soon start working on some of the features you mentioned.

And now, the correct answer is: we are launching new regions - Australia and Japan.

Here is Tanya, drawing the winners.

Congratulations to the two winners: jbermudez5 and Abdullah Shawkat :)

They will be notified by email and the credits will be added to their virtual wallets with SashiDo.

Within the next couple of days, we will send you an email with information on how you can reserve a slot in one of the new regions regions so stay tuned!

Meanwhile,
Happy coding!

Imagine if there was a way to set up SSL on your website in just one click. How cool would that be? Well with SashiDo and Let's Encrypt now you can easily achieve it!

Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit, and it is a one click option for your web app hosted on SashiDo. They let people and organizations around the world obtain, renew, and manage SSL/TLS certificates. Their certificates can be used by websites to enable secure HTTPS connections.

We, at SashiDo, love what they are doing so we decided to give you an easy way to use their services when you use a custom domain name with your app in SashiDo.
You can activate your Let's Encrypt certificate through your app dashboard -> App Settings -> Emails & Hosting.

Let's Encrypt believes in and encourages automating as much as possible in system administrative work, so do we. That's why once you enable your certificate, we renew it when necessary, so you no longer have to worry about your SSL certificate anymore.

You can check Let's Encrypt FAQ page for any questions regarding their certificates or contact us at support@sashido.io or via our live chat. We will be happy to answer all your questions.

Happy coding :)

Having a Backup is a matter of great importance. Just recently GitLab reminded us that mistakes do happen sometimes.
We, as a service, couldn't afford to lose any clients data, so we have always had internal disaster recovery backups of all the data on our servers, but we felt that this wasn't enough.

We wanted to give our clients the ability to be in control of their database backups and also the ability to quickly restore them if necessary.
This is the reason why we are rolling out our new feature - Automatic Database Backups.

You can activate your Database Backups through your app's dashboard under Automatic Database Backups menu.

After the activation, this will be the place where you can find the list of all your backups and choose one to restore if necessary.

Тhere you can also see your Restore History as list of all restored backups, containing the date of the restoration, the date of the backup restored and the collaborator who restored it.

If you wish to deactivate the service, you can do this in App Settings -> Automatic Database Backups.

In case you are still wondering why Automatic Database Backups are so important and if you really need them, here are a couple of things that we can mention to help you decide:

• We do keep backups of the entire system, so in case you need us to restore something, we'll start the restore immediately. However the restore process can take from a couple of hours up to 48 hours depending on how big the database is. On the other hand with the Automatic Database Backups restore, the process will be a lot more quicker. So in urgent situations, especially when you have a production app used daily by hundreds and thousands of people you will definitely appreciate if you can have your content restored as soon as possible.

• There are many cases when our customers contact us and explain how a member of their team working on the project has deleted an important row in the database. Very often such cases happen if a couple of people are managing the same project and especially when there is a new employee. So the Automatic Database Backups will give you a piece of mind that if something like this happens, you can recover your data within a few clicks.

• The Automatic Database Backups not only have a restore option, but also a backup download button which means that you will be able to download your backups locally and review the info they contain. This way you can for example restore just a specific collection or a single record and not the entire database.

• Another cool thing about the Automatic Database Backups is the Restore History you will have access to in the Dashboard. You will be able to keep track of who has performed a restore and when.

• Last but not least, the Automatic Database Backups will save you time- you will not have to worry about keeping manual backups- everything will happen automatically for you.

Check out our updated F.A.Q. Page for more info and if you have any other questions, you can contact us at support@sashido.io or via our live chat.

Happy backing up,
SashiDo Team