Dev Diary #001 - Building Astralis
Astralis isn't starting with a massive team, a giant budget, or a perfectly finished product. Here's what I'm building, why I'm building it, and where I'm starting.
Building Astralis
Astralis started with a pretty simple question:
What would hosting look like if we just... did it right?
Not revolutionary hosting.
Not "the future of cloud infrastructure."
Just hosting that works, is easy to understand, and doesn't make you feel like you're being upcharged every time you need something.
That idea eventually turned into Astralis.
And now I'm actually building it.
Which is still kind of weird to say.
Starting from scratch
One of the interesting things about building a hosting company is that there's a lot more to it than putting a server somewhere and selling accounts.
There's infrastructure.
- Billing.
- Control panels.
- Networking.
- Backups.
- Monitoring.
- Support.
- Documentation.
- Websites.
- Security.
And then there's the fun part: making all of those things work together without making the customer care about any of them.
That's what I'm working toward.
The goal isn't for customers to know what server they're sitting on, what virtualization platform I'm using, or how I've structured everything behind the scenes.
They should be able to sign up, choose what they need, deploy their website, and get on with their day.
The complexity should be mine, not theirs.
We're starting with web hosting
Astralis originally had a different direction.
I spent a lot of time thinking about game hosting, infrastructure, servers, and all the things that come with running those services.
But as I worked through the idea, web hosting started making more sense.
It's something people actually need.
It's a market I understand.
And, more importantly, it's an opportunity to build the kind of hosting experience I actually want to use.
So that's where we're starting.
The initial hosting platform is built around VPS infrastructure, with the plan to grow the underlying infrastructure alongside the customer base rather than buying a massive amount of capacity before I actually need it.
That means we're starting small.
And honestly?
That's completely fine.
Keeping the product simple
One of the first decisions I made was to avoid the traditional hosting-plan maze.
I'm not interested in naming plans things like:
Starter Pro Plus
Business Turbo
Ultimate Cloud
Enterprise Ultra™
You get the idea.
Instead, the plans are based around one resource that actually matters:
RAM.
Need 1 GB?
Choose 1 GB.
Need 4 GB?
Choose 4 GB.
Need something bigger?
We'll figure it out.
Storage scales alongside the resources, and the rest of the infrastructure is handled behind the scenes.
It's a much simpler way of thinking about hosting.
At least, that's the idea.
Building the Astralis experience
There's another part of Astralis that I'm spending a lot of time on:
the software customers actually use.
I'm using established technology underneath the platform, but I don't want the customer experience to feel like they're logging into some complicated hosting panel that has been slapped onto a website.
I'm building the Astralis Control Panel around the experience I want customers to have.
The goal isn't to reinvent every piece of hosting software.
It's to take the complicated stuff, clean it up, and make it feel like one cohesive Astralis product.
That's probably going to take a while.
And I'm sure I'm going to change my mind about half of it along the way.
That's kind of the point of this whole thing, though.
I'll write about it when I do.
Small company. Small infrastructure. Big plans.
Right now, Astralis is small.
Really small.
I'm not operating dozens of data centers or thousands of servers.
I'm starting with a handful of locations and infrastructure that I can actually understand and manage.
As customers arrive, I'll expand.
- More capacity.
- More locations.
- Better systems.
- Eventually, larger infrastructure.
But I'm not interested in pretending I'm already there.
There's something nice about building something from the ground up and watching it grow one piece at a time.
That's where Astralis is right now.
At the beginning.
And there's still a lot to do.
What's next?
There's a lot left to build before Astralis is where I want it to be.
Over the next few entries, I'll probably talk about things like:
- How I'm designing the hosting infrastructure
- Why I chose the initial locations
- Building the Astralis Control Panel
- How I'm approaching pricing
- Setting up monitoring and backups
- Preparing for the first customers
- The things that inevitably break along the way
Some of this stuff will be technical.
Some of it won't.
And I'm sure some of it will involve me making a decision, realizing it was a terrible idea, and changing it two weeks later.
That's part of building something.
I'll document it anyway.
For now...
Astralis is still being built.
The website is coming together. The infrastructure is taking shape. The systems behind it are being configured.
There's still plenty left to do.
But this is the first real step.
I'm building hosting that I'd actually want to use.
And this is where the story starts.
Genuinely Good Hosting.