Frequently Asked Questions

Account Limits

To ensure system stability, every account is subject to limits on the amount of CPU cores, memory and disk storage it can use. You can view these limits in the control panel under Account > Account Limits. To avoid abuse, new accounts start with lower limits. After you make the first top-up to your account, your limits will increase to 10 pods and 2 TB of storage. If you need more than that, please just send an email to hello@pikapods.com.

Sending emails

Some apps need to send emails to work properly. Currently PikaPods doesn’t offer email sending services. Some popular and proven options are Mailjet, Mailgun and Postmark. If you already use Amazon AWS, there is also SES.

No matter which provider you use for emails, be sure to use a submission port, like port 465 or 587. To prevent spam from our system port 25 is blocked.

Using custom domains

Moved to Pod Management > Custom Domains.

Accessing pod files using SFTP

Moved to Pod Management > Files.

Accessing the pod’s database

Moved to Pod Management > Database.

Adding new apps

New apps are regularly being added. If your favorite app isn’t available yet, you can suggest or vote for it on our feedback page. For an app to be suitable for PikaPods, it should roughly match those criteria:

Be a web application and use one HTTPS port only
Not use large amounts of CPU or bandwith by design (e.g. video encoding)
Not have a potential for abuse or impact on other pods (e.g. proxies or VPNs)
Have a license that allows self-hosting
Not compete with the author’s own paid hosting service, unless alternative hosting options are actively promoted.
Have an official (or semi-official) Docker image available
Be actively developed and security issues are adressed

Updating apps

Providing you with a stable experience is our main priority. As such we don’t just automatically apply updates as they are released, but test them in a staging environment before making them available to all pods. Updates should also be for a stable release (in the context of the project) and released for a minimum of 3 days. Generally updates will reach your pod within 1-2 weeks of their release.

For security-related updates, we may do ad-hoc updates of single apps.

Missing environment variables

When adding new apps, we will add the most common and useful env vars from the start. Sometimes this doesn’t include very specific or newly-added env vars. If you find that an env var you want to use is missing, just send us an email to to hello@pikapods.com and we will add it right away.

Backup of pod data

Moved to Pod Management > Backup.

Debugging a Pod

Moved to Pod Management > Debug.

IPv6 Support

We fully support IPv6 as of May 2023. Before this, IPv6 worked over TCP, but possibly not ICMP. If your pod was created before May 2023, you may need to recreate it. This will happen automatically during updates or when you change resources or env vars.

Support for individual apps

If you have any concerns with your PikaPods account, billing or with running apps, email to hello@pikapods.com any time. You will generally receive a response within a few hours on working days.

For well-defined, one-off setup tasks (like setting up email), we can sometimes help, if your account has seen a minimum of $50 in top-ups.

Unfortunately we don’t have the resources to help deal with specific app issues. You may find help in a community forum or similar for that app. Please don’t file a Github issue, unless it is a genuine bug report. This is to avoid overloading the app author with support requests.