A modern operations platform for hosting providers, bringing infrastructure, customer accounts and application management into one system.
Context
Hosting providers tend to operate from tools that were never designed to work together. The control panel knows about accounts, the server tooling knows about infrastructure, and the applications customers actually deploy sit somewhere between the two. Work that ought to be one action becomes three, in three systems, with no shared view of what a customer has.
ZenHost brings infrastructure, customer accounts and application management into one platform. A hosting provider runs its servers, its customers and the applications those customers deploy from the same place, rather than stitching together a control panel, a billing system and a set of server tools that know nothing about each other.
What was built
Product decisions
A hosting provider is not one customer, it is many, and the boundaries between them are the product. Modelling accounts as tenanted data from the start means isolation is a property of the system rather than something enforced by careful use.
Most tooling separates managing a server from managing what runs on it. Holding both in one platform is the point of ZenHost — the provider sees a customer, their infrastructure and their applications together.
ZenHost is being hardened against a real provider's workflows before wider release. Running a pilot first surfaces the operational cases that a specification does not contain, and it is the reason the product is still described as a pilot rather than as generally available.
Alcra runs the infrastructure and supports the software, so the technical decisions come back to us. That is the same responsibility we take on in client work, applied to a product where nobody else can absorb the cost of getting it wrong.
ZenHost is currently being piloted with NivaCity while Alcra tests real workflows and hardens the platform for wider use.
Alcra continues to develop ZenHost, hardening it against the workflows the pilot exposes and planning the path to wider release.
Tell us which systems you are working across and what breaks in the gaps between them.
