Setting HASH up

We're developing HASH in the open (on GitHub), and working with early "lighthouse partners" to help them self-host HASH in production. However, because of the application's current rate of change, we haven't yet released public docs for self-hosting HASH. Once these are ready, we'll publish them here. In the meantime, feel free to get in touch to tell us more about your use case; or if you're comfortable finding your way round a monorepo, download the code and Terraform files from our repository. We're happy to try and answer questions over on Discord, but are only providing self-hosting support to our lighthouse partners presently.

Choosing A Version

If you’re uncertain about whether HASH is right for you: try signing up for the hosted global network. It’s free to create an account, and you'll be able to get a sense as to what HASH is all about. To learn more about what you’ll be able to do with HASH, read about its use cases.

If you're a non-technical user: you should also use the hosted global network. Ultimately we plan to make it as easy to run your own HASH instance as it is to install an app locally on your mobile or desktop device, but the current process is a lot more complicated than that. Using the hosted version of HASH means that there are no servers or containers to worry about, and no upfront set up or ongoing infrastructure maintenance costs. In fact, you don't need to know anything about these! You're currently reading our developer documentation, but check out the user guide for more on using HASH as a less technical person.

If security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy are concerns: we're currently in the process of obtaining SOC2 compliance certification. However, we understand that many enterprise organizations may nevertheless wish to host HASH within their own walled infrastructure, even then. Please contact us if you have specific requirements you'd like to discuss, and to learn more about getting set up.

If you're still uncertain about which version to use: you can always switch between the hosted and self-hosted versions of HASH later, without being locked in to either. Do whatever's easiest for you now and you can always change it up later. It's quicker to get started with the hosted version, so we generally recommend that. In the future we plan to allow self-hosted instances of HASH to be linked with one another and the global network. These "federated instances" will be able to see and pull public information from the global network, as well as publish to it for use by others. Right now, entity visibility settings are unique "per instance" of HASH. For example, a user of hash.ai will be able to see other hash.ai user's public information, but nothing 'public' of a self-hosted user. Conversely, users of another instance (e.g. example.com) would be able to see other example.com user's public entities and types, but not those of hash.ai users. The data model we've adopted allows everybody to stay in control of their data, fully owning their records, while still enabling the secure, on-demand, easy-sharing of information when required.