Ondina is our response to how web hosting should be run: a company whose true focus is the customers and not the profits. This ideology should be applied to any type of business, but web hosting is where we see it at its worst. We’ve seen companies that are still charging extra for email accounts, falsely advertising “unlimited” anything on their site, overcrowding their servers, blaming customers for the company’s shortcomings, and ignoring cries for change. In addition, they tend to attempt to suck every dollar they can from their customers: whether it be for “premium” support, for add-ons that should come standard, or for sub-par support. In addition to these short-comings, we’ve found a lot of hosts that run older, less secure software, rudimentary configurations, and offer generally sub-par products.
Now, there are hosting companies that are doing a lot of good things for customers; however, generally speaking, the current state of web hosts and how they operate is still a two-way mirror. Your host can see everything you do, but there is no way for you to audit them. How do you know you’re not sitting on an over-crowded server? How do you know that they monitor your machines for up-time and stability? How can you be certain that the downtime which occurred earlier was really because of faulty hardware? You have to take them at their word and trust everything they say.
We’ve been working on a company that operates differently. It operates on Open Source mentality. If you’re going to pay us and trust us to host your website, whether it’s a personal blog or your company’s portfolio, you have the right to know how we operate and how the servers are maintained, and to have complete confidence that what we’re doing is the best possible way to present and maintain your presence on the web. That’s why Ondina is taking business practices and hosting to a new level.
From a company perspective, we plan to provide nearly 1:1 transparency on what we do regarding your account. From displaying account notes to breaking down where each penny goes from your monthly payment so you know the reasoning behind how much your hosting plan costs. We also plan to publish our entire infrastructure’s layout for review by the community and to show you how we think all hosting companies should operate. We plan to spend more time and money on keeping existing customers happy and thrilled with our hosting instead of trying to hard sell new users. Finally, and most importantly, we plan to always offer the highest quality products and services with best practices in business and execution.
From a technical aspect, we will be providing that same 1:1 transparency with regards to your account. We will make our real-time monitoring systems available to you, provide live provisioning and population information for the server you’re on, and detail hardware information and your account’s resource utilization compared to the average account on your server. In addition, we plan to offer diverse hosting options such as PHP, Python, and Rails hosting all on the same account and to provide a simple, yet powerful, control panel with which you can control every aspect of how you host. Ultimately, we will be giving the power back to the user.
Ondina is more than just another hosting company. We’re here to push the limits of affordable shared hosting, offering things that the majority of hosts force you to upgrade and pay more to get. Ondina is here to set a new standard in web hosting.