I’m working on a small project called OkayWebHost, a managed hosting service I built because a lot of people around me (local businesses, doctors, friends building side-projects) needed fast, reliable hosting but didn’t have the technical capacity to manage VPS servers, set up CloudPanel, configure caching, manage backups, or secure their WordPress installations.
Most mainstream hosting providers in India either oversell shared plans or make managed hosting extremely expensive. I kept meeting people who wanted the benefits of a VPS—speed, control, stability—but not the overhead of actually maintaining one. So I created a lightweight, opinionated managed hosting service around CloudPanel.
Here’s what I’ve built so far:
• CloudPanel-based stack (Nginx + PHP-FPM, Redis, MariaDB) Pre-configured for performance out of the box. Users get the benefits without ever touching the panel unless they want to.
• Personal onboarding Every site is configured manually by me (for now). No “click and pray” dashboards. Proper DNS setup, server tuning, SSL, caching, rate limits, and security hardening.
• Isolated environments Each project gets its own VPS environment. I avoid the shared-hosting “noisy neighbor” issue completely.
• WordPress-first experience Automatic object caching, image optimization recommendations, and plugins/theme restrictions to keep performance and security tight.
• Simple pricing I want this to remain accessible to freelancers, agencies, doctors, SMEs—in India especially.
I’m not trying to compete with giants like Kinsta, SiteGround, or Cloudways. This started because I helped a few people speed up their horribly slow WordPress sites, and that led to more requests, which eventually pulled me into building a proper service around it.
At the moment, I’m doing everything myself: provisioning servers, automating deployments, writing the dashboard, handling support. It’s been a fascinating learning curve.
I’d love feedback from the HN community on:
1. Where should I focus next to make this genuinely useful? Developer tools? APIs? Git deploys? Better onboarding? A self-serve control panel?
2. What pain points do you see in the hosting space that small providers can still solve?
3. If you were using a managed host, what’s the one thing you’d want done exceptionally well?
If anyone is curious, here’s the site: https://okaywebhost.com
I’m happy to answer anything—technical decisions, stack, deployment process, CloudPanel quirks, pricing choices, scaling limits, or even the messy parts of trying to bootstrap a hosting service as a solo founder.
Thanks for reading, and grateful for any insights you share.
— Jayant