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Release early, release often

Ready or Not – here i come? Can we really go live that early? Shouldn't we do a public BETA period to gain more feedback first? __ We think: YES we can! You can read it in any startup advice book: Launch early. Our new cloud hosting service is general available since yesterday. We build it within a fairly short time (~12 months) and had only a short closed BETA period (~1 month). We do managed hosting for over 5 years – a business where reliability is one of the core values. And Platform as a Service is just a label for a modern approach of scalable hassle-free hosting solutions. This PaaS market is very young and still a changing category in the wide field of cloud hosting. Listening to customers and their needs will influence the way current services work.

Is our platform really mature or yet another MVP or even just a tech demo?

We hope that you take the time and check it out yourself. Our full featured freemium plan comes handy here. Please consider:

  • It's built on top of AWS. We are standing on shoulders of giants. We don't have to take care of all the bare metal.
  • Our design is paranoid. Relying on AWS is not enough. Nearly all components are redundant and in different availability zones.
  • The underlying core software is proven to be stable. De facto standard hosting components: Debian, Apache, Puppet, grsecurity & HAproxy
  • We are experienced. Our first generation hosting, a dedicated stack of own hardware, is still running. Uptime: 99.9%

We are a a small agile team. Instead of trying to build an "egg-laying wool-milk-sow" we focused on a  optimized PHP stack. It's just LAMP with deployment candy on top, but we like it. The most important features, the ones you will need in production, are included – with attention to detail. The documentation is very complete. Our unique r/w-storage solution allows all type of work-flows. Billing works, you can pay with credit card and will get a nice PDF invoice each month. We tested everything intensively and integrated feedback from our BETA testers (thanks again!). From our perspective we've released a very solid 1.0 stable. But it's software and it cuts both ways: Things go wrong sometimes but they are easy to fix. We are looking forward to get more great feedback (criticism & props) to move on the next release.

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