mattgrayisok

As crazy as it might sound, I'm trying going to build a hosting service. It'll be one of the products which I launch in 2018 as part of this year's personal goals.

Why a hosting service? Because I feel like it's something I'm good at, and there's a specific slant I want to place on it that I believe there's a market for.

I've put together an initial landing page at servd.host. I'll be re-doing it though with a few new ideas I've had in the last week.

My USP is @CraftCMS hosting, with all the bells and whistles, automated and live within 100 seconds. Just add a git repo URL.

The target market is digital agencies and freelancers who are building Craft websites but don't necessarily want to provision and manage their own servers.

All of the back end will be opaque - customers won't need to select specific CPU and RAM requirements - they don't care about that stuff as long as their site is up and stays up.

In terms of additional features I want to eventually offer all of these with every hosted project:

• CDN
• SSL
• Automated database backups
• Staging environment

All included in the single monthly cost.

I've yet to determine the exact pricing model I want to use. I feel like a good way to scale pricing would be on hits-per-month which would allow small projects to use cheap packages and then scale up through the payment tiers as their traffic increases.

Maybe that's something I can get some end-user feedback on when the time is right.

I'm hoping to build and iterate on the platform based on a series of experiments that I perform. I will, of course, be documenting those as I go so that we can all learn from what I expect will be many mistakes.

All related posts will be tagged with #servd so keep an eye on that if you're interested. I should set up an rss feed or something...

🖥️🚀✨