Hi 👋 I'm Klynton — I've been a WebFaction customer for the last 10 years and I worked there for 4 years.
Since the company was acquired a couple years ago, I've seen my friends who stayed get more and more overworked. I have seen feature development stagnate, and because of overwork, the quality of service start to decline.
I stayed on a customer because it was still the best hosting platform at that time. But planning for the worst, I started working on my own hosting platform at the end of January 2019.
Today I'd like to introduce you to Opalstack!
What are you going to get?
The service is still in beta, but is very stable. Here’s what’s available now:
🎚 A custom control panel which blends power and simplicity to let you easily manage your hosting account.
⚙️ Installers for popular web projects including: 🐍 Django, 🛤 Ruby on Rails, Node.js, 👻 Ghost, PHP, and 📝WordPress.
🚀 Powerful servers with fast SSD storage configured, monitored, and managed by us for you.
📬 A modern email system designed for security and deliverability with powerful filters and monitoring to stop spam.
⌨️ Dev-friendly SSH access with popular tools and languages preinstalled and the ability to install whatever you need.
🌐 Regional managed DNS that helps your site audience get a faster overall experience.
🔐 Automated Let’s Encrypt so you don’t have to worry about renewing or creating SSL certificates.
🙂 Fanatical customer service and expert technical support 24/7 so that you can get the help you need when you need it. Sean Fulmer has joined to lead our support team - having managed support at WebFaction for nearly ten years, he built and led the support team with whom you've had so many good interactions in the past.
What aren’t you going to get?
You won’t get:
❌ Burdened with managing your own VPS or some overly-complex cloud service.
❌ Slow, indifferent, and unhelpful customer service and support.
❌ Left in the dark about major changes to the platform for months at a time.
❌ A corporate parent that isn’t interested in developer-friendly shared and managed hosting
❌ Abandoned — We’re in this for the long haul and will never abandon the platform and customers to the highest bidder.
Hold up, this is all very vague.
You are absolutely right. It is vague. Deliberately so. We’re still working on the platform and we won’t ship features that aren’t finished. There’s a lot to build.
The plan is to open our doors, for a small group of people, on April 15th (the same day your taxes are due if you're in the US).
We'll provide specifics when we can (I know you are anxious, we are too!) —follow @opalstack on Twitter and/or the Opalstack blog for announcements.