Projects · Mini Hostpapa
What Is a Hosting Company?
The business we are in. Web hosting, who we serve, and the vocabulary every later volume assumes you know.
What Is a Hosting Company?
Pull up a chair. Before CloudStack, before Terraform, before anyone says “just spin up a VM”, we need to agree on what business we're actually in.
HostKid is not a datacenter tour. It's not a Kubernetes hobby. It's a hosting company: a business that sells reliable infrastructure and services so other people can run websites, apps, and email without owning a rack.
What is web hosting?
At the simplest level: web hosting is renting compute, storage, and network so a customer's stuff lives on the internet with acceptable uptime, support, and billing.
That “stuff” might be:
- A WordPress site on shared hosting
- A Linux server with root access (VPS)
- A domain and DNS records
- Business email mailboxes
- Backups, SSL, maybe object storage later
Hosting sits between bare metal in a rack and fully managed SaaS. We own the platform. The customer owns their app, with boundaries we'll define in Security & trust posture.
Datacenter sells power, space, cross-connects. Hosting sells products (sites, VPS, email) on top of infrastructure. SaaS sells the app itself (Shopify, Gmail). HostKid is hosting: we productize infrastructure.
What is a hosting company?
A hosting company is more than servers. It's:
- Products people can buy without talking to an engineer
- Billing that turns usage into invoices
- Support when DNS breaks at the worst moment
- Automation so provisioning doesn't depend on who clicked what in the UI last Tuesday
- Trust: customers hand you domains, email, and often their business
Companies like OVH, HostPapa, and thousands of regional hosts run this playbook at different scales. HostKid is the same playbook, smaller footprint, fully documented.
Who are our customers?
For this project, we design for:
| Segment | What they want | Why they pick a host |
|---|---|---|
| SMB / solo founder | Simple site or VPS, clear pricing | Don't want to run infrastructure |
| Agency / freelancer | Many sites, reselling, quick spin-up | Time is money; panel + API matter |
| Developer / startup | VPS, DNS, API, root access | Control without building a cloud |
| Reseller (later) | White-label, bulk accounts | Margin on someone else's platform |
We are not designing for hyperscale enterprise on day one. We are designing so a Solutions Engineer can explain the model in an interview. That's Volume 25 energy.
Vocabulary you'll see everywhere
Get these straight now. Every later volume uses them:
- Tenant / account: a customer (or reseller) in the control plane
- SKU / offering: a sellable product (e.g. “VPS 2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM”)
- Control panel / portal: where customers manage services
- Provisioning: turning “I bought it” into “it exists and works”
- Shared hosting: many sites on one managed stack
- VPS: virtual private server; customer gets isolated compute
- SLA: promised availability or response times
- Control plane: CloudStack + our internal services (portal, API, billing hooks)
If you only remember one thing: a hosting company sells outcomes (my site is online, my mail delivers) backed by platform mechanics (VMs, DNS, billing) customers never want to think about.
What HostKid is trying to prove
We're building a mini host to learn in public:
- How product, ops, and engineering fit together
- How a customer click becomes a running service (Volume 19)
- How decisions (CloudStack, ISO scope, metrics) stay documented, not tribal
The intro covers why I started. This doc covers what we're building.
What this doc does not cover
- Revenue math → Business model & revenue
- Org chart → Organization & departments
- Technical boxes → High-level architecture
Next: Business model & revenue. Follow the money.