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Show HN: Bootstrapped Hosting company

7 points by vznatvps ↗ HN
This is some short information of how I bootstrapped my hosting company, pretty much an MVP of a hosting company.

1. Provide MINIMAL/NO support. No technical support is provided, all VPS plans and Web Hosting plans are unmanaged and provide only support on issues with services provided by us (billing, control panel) but nothing inside the VPS unless it is a fault on our end (network misconfiguration).

2. Automated setup. All VPSs are deployed instantly, (à la DigitalOcean) so no humans have to manually deploy them.

END PRODUCT: https://definedcodehosting.com

All payment is automatic via Stripe or Bitpay so the only human maintenance is checking the host node. Which is also automated, thanks Nagios!

5 comments

[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 22.3 ms ] thread
Terpaholic
Can you talk a little bit about your metrics or future plans? Looks interesting, would love to know more about how you're competing in this pretty competitive space.
vznatvps
We started off with a few servers in the Netherlands and just hosted the Mini NAT only range which took off really well. We've now bought a server in France to start a dedicated IPv4 range. We plan to expand this range into more countries and more places as it grows. Obviously then we will need a few more techs to manage the servers and it would become less bootstrapped.
stevekemp
It's interesting to see people using NAT to solve the problem of restricted IPs. It is probably too late for a newcomer to claim an allocation of IPs from RIPE,etc.

Are you considering IPv6 support? Several people are out there offering IPv6-only hosting, (as well as the traditional folk who offer both), which is nice to see.

As a final question how are you planning to detect and deal with spammers, or copyright infringers? Both are drawn to cheap plans..

vznatvps
NAT is an interesting solution and we offer 20 ports which helps people still host websites, apps and services on our servers without needing a dedicated IPv4 address (reverse proxy).

We have IPv6 support, you just need to submit a ticket after ordering and we add 20 native IPv6 addresses!

We have a rate limited SMTP port and if people go over this we will give 1 warning, ask for the reason and if it's valid then we will either just let it continue or lift the limit. Repeated offences will have services terminated immediately. Same goes for copyright offences. The resources are fairly small (HDD/SSD, BW) so it is not too hard to detect.

You may be interested (since you appear to offer DNS Hosting) that many of these Mini plans are used as DNS slaves because of their cheap price. An interesting use I've found.