It Started with a Rack of Servers
We're engineers. We've spent the last decade building and deploying applications on every hosting platform you can name — AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Hetzner, you name it. And we kept running into the same problems.
Expensive egress fees. Hidden costs. Oversold "cloud" that couldn't handle sustained IO. Support that routed to chatbots. Data stored in jurisdictions we couldn't control.
So we did what engineers do: we built our own.
The Hardware Reality Check
We started with a rack of servers in a European data centre (Poland). Here's what we had:
- 256 GB DDR3 RAM — for dedicated workloads where stability matters more than clock speed
- 128 GB DDR4 RAM — for performance-critical VPS and database workloads
- NVMe storage — 5-10x faster random IO than SATA SSD. This isn't a luxury, it's the baseline
- SSD storage — for cost-effective bulk storage and backups
- HDD storage — for cold storage, backups, and archival data
This isn't a cloud. It's real hardware that we own, racked in a European data centre (Poland), with real UK-based engineers managing it.
Why "Cloud" Is Often Overpriced
Here's a dirty secret about cloud hosting: most of what you're paying for is margin, not value.
When you rent a $100/month VPS from a major cloud provider, the hardware cost is typically $15-20. The rest covers their markup, their sales team, their marketing budget, and their shareholders' returns.
We don't have shareholders. We have servers, an API, and a commitment to transparent pricing.
The UK Advantage
We're UK-based for good reasons:
- Data jurisdiction — Your data is protected under UK and EU law. We're a UK-registered company with European data centres (Poland), giving you both UK legal protection and GDPR compliance.
- Latency — For UK customers, our European data centre (Poland) means 15-25ms latency instead of 80-150ms from US East Coast providers.
- Support in your timezone — When something breaks at 3pm GMT, our engineers are awake and available. No waiting for the US shift to start.
- GDPR by default — We built GDPR compliance into the platform from day one, not as an afterthought checkbox.
What We Built
The platform is custom from the ground up:
- KVM/libvirt for hardware-level virtualisation — real isolation, not container sharing
- ZFS + NVMe storage — copy-on-write, snapshots, compression, checksumming
- Custom provisioning API — VPS up in ~60 seconds. No control panel overhead, no bloat
- Stripe billing — subscriptions, prorated refunds, cancel anytime
- Prometheus + Grafana monitoring — full observability of every host
- PowerDNS — DNS management built into the platform
The Pricing Philosophy
Our pricing is simple: we calculated our hardware costs, added a reasonable margin for operations and support, and that's the price. No "burstable" CPUs that are actually throttled. No fine-print egress fees. No surprise invoices.
$5/month for a VPS with NVMe storage. $10 for 2 vCPU and 2 GB RAM. These aren't loss-leader introductory prices — they're sustainable prices we can offer because we own the hardware and keep operations lean.
Engineers on Support
This matters more than most hosting companies want to admit. When you open a support ticket with Hostingowy, you're talking to the same engineers who built the platform, who racked the servers, who wrote the provisioning code.
No chatbots. No "level 1" script readers. No "we've escalated this to our senior team." Just engineers who understand the full stack from metal to application.
Free Migration, Zero Downtime
We know switching hosting providers is a pain. That's why we offer free migration — we'll move your workloads from any provider, any platform, with zero downtime. Our team handles the migration, you just confirm it's working.
The Road Ahead
We're launching with KVM VPS, managed WordPress, dedicated servers, and enterprise colocation. Over the next quarters, we'll add:
- Object storage (S3-compatible)
- Managed Kubernetes
- Dedicated GPU instances
- Public API with SDKs
But the core philosophy won't change: own the hardware, price transparently, support with real engineers, and keep data in the UK where it belongs.
— The Hostingowy Engineering Team