Reverse-Engineering the UniFi Inform Protocol for Multi-Tenant Hosting Solutions
By
baconomatic
Crisp on the outside, thoughtful on the inside. A keeper.
Summary
The article details the author's experience running a UniFi hosting service and the economic challenges of single-tenant VPS hosting. It explains how they discovered a solution by reverse-engineering the UniFi inform protocol, which allows devices to phone home to controllers on port 8080. While the payload is AES-encrypted, the plaintext header contains enough information to build multi-tenant routing, enabling more cost-effective hosting by routing multiple customers' devices to their respective controllers based on header data.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledEach customer needed their own VPS. DigitalOcean droplets ran $4-6/month. I was charging $7-8. That's $1-2 of margin per customer, and any support request at all wiped it out. I was essentially volunteering.
Every UniFi device phones home to its controller on port 8080. The payload is AES-encrypted, but the header is plaintext, and that's enough to build multi-tenant routing.
The obvious fix is multi-tenancy.
The product worked. People wanted hosted controllers, mostly so they didn't have to deal with hardware, port forwarding, backups. The problem was the economics.
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