Less Bits | Bellingham, WA | Full Time | REMOTE | L2/L3 Linux support, devops, marketing, more
Less Bits is building a company of thoughtful people while reinventing the hosting industry. We're looking for long-term employees. We raised an angel round years ago, we're now growing on revenue and not seeking funding.
Our main products include:
- ServerPilot: securely run fast WordPress and PHP apps on cloud servers.
- HostLaunch: easily run your own hosting company on DigitalOcean, ServerPilot, and Stripe.
- HeatShield (launching soon): a WordPress WAF leveraging a local ModSecurity/Golang agent.
We're growing and interviewing for many positions. Our most critical needs at the moment are:
- L2/L3 support: Linux, OS fundamentals, debugging, fast learner, highly professional. Hosting experience a plus.
- DevOps: All of the above + Python and devops experience. 25-50% time as L2/L3 support.
If you have even a little experience with Linux or are looking to learn, we've built https://hostlaunch.io/ to make it very easy to start a managed cloud hosting company.
Just drop in your DigitalOcean, ServerPilot, SendGrid, and Stripe API keys, set your prices, and you've got a hosting company.
The same reason resellers exist in pretty much all industries: The buyer doesn't actually care who they purchase from. When you're a reseller, in many ways your true customer is the vendor you are reselling, who are simply purchasing the service of customer acquisition.
There's a huge market of people who want to purchase managed hosting, not be responsible for their own servers. Think of the customers (such as WordPress developers) of any traditional hosting company like DreamHost.
The purpose of HostLaunch is to make it extremely easy to start your own managed hosting business to sell web hosting services in that same market.
I don’t get it. What’s your edge? You basically have no control over anything. Why would the customer go with jsamuel hosting rather than ornornor hosting if we’re Both reselling exactly the same thing? Or why not stay with dreamhost for that matter? What’s the reseller’s edge in that case? Anything goes wrong you have to wait on DO to sort it out. And price wise you can’t do anything that anyone else can’t get from DO too. I’m probably missing the point but I’d really like to understand.
Managed hosting is much more than what DO does, I suppose. They offer services like setting up a Wordpress, emails, nameservers, etc. for people who don't want or don't know how to. You sell customer service basically, you talk to people on the phone, usually works better within your local community.
Edit: and I suppose HostLaunch's edge is to get all the hassle of setting up that business out of the way so you can focus on customer service instead of plumbing servers together.
This is perfect for freelancers. When someone commissioned them to build a wordpress site, they can offer them to host the site on that platform. No need to spend time to build their own hosting infra each of their clients. It's also pretty cheap as you can cram three or more Wordpress site into a single $5 vps on DO.
Another use case is people in 3rd world country sometimes need international hosting but don't have any local payment method accepted by international companies (they only accept visa/mastercard/amex, not small regional card/bank network). You can tap that market by offering local payment processor support, essentially become a middle man for those vps companies. This service doesn't support this kind of use case, but other web hosting kits are very popular in 3rd world countries for this reason.
In addition to other answers offered here it can be a good addition to an existing business. For example if you do some IT consulting with local companies you can offer them hosting as well without building out your own hosting infrastructure.
In markets such as hosting where differentiation is largely about quality of support, brand, and marketing, there are many different reasons why customers choose their hosting company. Some people will stay with their existing host. Many others, both existing and new customers entering the market, will seek out new solutions or be attracted to a different company for varied reasons (poor support experience with existing provider, recommendation of a friend, strong marketing attracted them, identified more closely with the brand values, etc.).
I'm not sure but it may be you're looking for an explanation of why consumers choose one product over others when the consumer doesn't have the full knowledge or information to make an ideal decision (regardless of whether they often believe they do). Brand and marketing have a huge impact in those cases, tied in with the values of the customer base driving who they trust and want to do business with.
Not OP but perhaps I can answer a different way. They are outsourcing the marketing. I can set up my own hosting company, do my advertising and to get clients and I don't have to worry about the technical stuff.
DigitalOcean is not a managed hosting provider. People who run applications on DigitalOcean need to have some understanding of the administrative principles involved in running cloud servers (Linux, web services, et cetera).
Our Show HN post didn't get much attention, but we also didn't have our marketing hopes set on that. We did turn into a successful startup, not in terms of raising money but instead in terms of growing off of revenue.
for example for precise the kernel ID is 7515 for the "DigitalOcean GrubLoader v0.2 (20160714) Ubuntu" kernel. If you do this be sure to double-check the id by listing the kernels using the API though. You can also do this with libcloud using 'ex_change_kernel' from the 'DigitalOcean_v2_NodeDriver'
LightSail's default firewall opens ports 22 (SSH) and 80 (HTTP) but has 443 (HTTPS) closed. That seems like a terrible default for making a developer-friendly service. Hopefully they fix that and open 443 by default. Otherwise, a lot of wasted time is going to be spent by developers who have configured SSL on their sites and don't know why it isn't working.
LightSail feels very similar to DreamCompute that DreamHost launched, including the approach of only allowing SSH public key auth without any option of using password auth. So, they're intentionally leaving out some users with that approach.
At ServerPilot, we decided early on not to support HHVM for similar reasons: we could see PHP 7 was going to offer the same performance benefits without the pain, breakage, and downtime of HHVM.
Early on, before PHP 7 was released, we had to explain this to many of our users who use ServerPilot to host WordPress, Magento, Laravel, and other PHP apps. They often thought there was no downside or risk with HHVM, it was as simple as dropping it in as a replacement. Nowadays, with the hype around HHVM dying down, we don't get requests for HHVM support much anymore.
For a huge company like Facebook, HHVM makes a lot of sense. And the existence of HHVM really sped up the PHP 7 development efforts and provided a great benchmark for how fast PHP 7 could be. So, the PHP community should be very grateful to Facebook for that even if HHVM isn't the future of PHP.
Though ServerPilot focuses more on ongoing server management (e.g. updates, control panel, monitoring, support) for DigitalOcean servers rather than one-click installers, there is now a one-click WordPress installer.
VPS != shared hosting. With a VPS, you get to decide what packages are installed (and what OS is installed, for that matter.) With shared hosting, you get a Unix account without administrator access, and have to put up with whatever packages you're given.
The point being that unless you're specifically in the latter situation, you get to decide what language platform to install and how to configure it, so why bother making your choice of language based on that?
See response to sibling, shared resources isn't the same thing as "shared hosting". Pedantic I know, but an important distinction within the industry.
Also important to my point because on a DO server you can install python or ruby, it's only on shared or managed servers where picking PHP because it's ubiquitous is valid idea. Shared hosting is often limited to PHP, SaaS and VPS providers are not.
Congrats to the PHP team. We're quite happy to see PHP 5.3 fully EOL'd recently and 5.6 now released. In trying to do our part to encourage adoption, we've already added support for 5.6 to ServerPilot (https://serverpilot.io/).
Less Bits is building a company of thoughtful people while reinventing the hosting industry. We're looking for long-term employees. We raised an angel round years ago, we're now growing on revenue and not seeking funding.
Our main products include:
- ServerPilot: securely run fast WordPress and PHP apps on cloud servers.
- HostLaunch: easily run your own hosting company on DigitalOcean, ServerPilot, and Stripe.
- HeatShield (launching soon): a WordPress WAF leveraging a local ModSecurity/Golang agent.
We're growing and interviewing for many positions. Our most critical needs at the moment are:
- L2/L3 support: Linux, OS fundamentals, debugging, fast learner, highly professional. Hosting experience a plus.
- DevOps: All of the above + Python and devops experience. 25-50% time as L2/L3 support.
Apply through https://lessbits.com/careers/ or email careers@lessbits.com. Thanks!