There are thousands upon thousands of hosting companies out there, most of which are barely breaking even, and are sold often for not much money.

This. They were struggling to find enough customers to break even. I had the customers but lacked the hosting knowledge and technology.

Buy my startup @ https://PretzelBox.cc. Jokes aside, PretzelBox is a hosting company aka backend in a box and your comments are giving me a ton of hope.

My first reaction was: "No idea what they do"

Then I read the "Host your blog right here on PretzelBox." and clicked the Blog link on top. "https://pretzelbox.notion.site/8d8ba84f16ea456984020cc15efad..."

And I thought to myself "So it's a well-marketed notion whitelabel reseller." You're probably good at marketing, but I'm not sure what Cloud back-end infrastructure IP you would have for sale...

No nonononono, I don’t have any idea how to make or sell Notion templates. This is an AWS backed storage and hosting solution through and through.

Your emails use SES for send/receive, files are stored in S3, auth is managed using cognito, the blog that users present to their site visitors are a Svelte SPA.

(The blog itself is a WIP so im using Notion to host my own content for now)

Think of it as a single replacement for Wordpress, dropbox/wetransfer, and gmail/gsuite.

The intellectual property is the working to provide a fully functioning business-y email inbox running on your custom domain, the code to host your own content at scale on your own domain, and code to secure access to private content.

So, your customers could use you for email management, use you to send and receive files, write blogs, and manage their team’s authentication and authorization.

I wish there were a simpler word to describe it but since it’s so many things, I went with “backend in a box”.

That’s… not a hosting company though?

I’m probably using the term very loosely but PretzelBox can be used to host a website, store and share images and files (like Dropbox or Imgur or wetransfer) and integrates with AWS to give you an entire backend you can extend to run a whole business.

In my mind, I feel this could/should qualify as a hosting service

I'm going to amplify what others here have already mentioned.

I read your landing page, I have no clue what it is you're selling or what it costs. I'm busy, you were lucky few minutes of my time, in the few minutes I couldn't figure out why I should give you more time or money.

I would highly suggest you work on the landing page:

  * What am I buying?
  * What problem are you solving?
  * What does it cost?
  * How is your solution better than others?

My impressions on visiting PB:

Ah, a .cc domain, they're too underfunded to pay for a .com. I probably shouldn't use them for anything too important.

I do not want to "join your beta list". I want a service, now or never.

"PretzelBox" is my backend? Backend to what? You tell me not to worry about domains, email, storage... Does that mean PB provides those? Are you better than WordPress? Are you better than gsuite?

Then there are some random (and I'm guessing fake (rude, I'm sure, but why should I believe them?)) testimonials.

Then some arbitrary text: "See what people have twisted their PretzelBoxes into" with no links, description, or examples... So I'm assuming PB has been twisted into nothing?

Finally, after much scrolling and bullshit, a list of features. So I get some email, some storage, you say unlimited, but I doubt. Still no pricing info. I get some blogs, "No need to learn WordPress!" but... I have to learn PB? How hard is PB. WordPress at least has a ton of support and resources.

Very invaluable feedback. I’ll find a way to make the landing page better. Thank you.

Edit: s/valuable/invaluable!

Usually this would be called a PaaS (Platform as a Service). It's another layer on top of a public cloud, AWS in this case.

Someone looking to save money on server costs by using a hosting company would effectively be going the other way in the stack: taking the cloud out of the equation and operating servers directly. The original poster in this thread acquired a hosting company to be able to provide this kind of service in their vertical.

PaaS is probably the right term and you’re right that the original comment was about buying bare metal servers to offer value added services.

When I made my comment, it was half in jest so I didn’t think through every word choice of mine.

Just to understand: did you buy any actual hardware? Or "hosting company" means services on top of another hosting company that actually has hardware somewhere?

Long-term rental for colocation cages in an existing datacenter + long-term leasing contracts for the hardware + long-term support contract with a guy that lives close to the datacenter and keeps a stack of HDDs in his basement

So in effect I provide cloud services and cloud APIs on top of physical bare-metal servers that are maintained and housed by someone else.