All posts by Marco Ceppi

After working diligently for the past three months the 6th has come and gone. We missed our target Private Preview Release day and it’s extremely disappointing. I first realized we weren’t going to make the release date on Saturday. While we have a lot of the infrastructure in place and systems working (in fact we’ve been hosting a select few sites – including my personal sites – for the past two months) the Control Panel really isn’t anywhere it needs to be in order to provide anything worth previewing. Originally I intended to have a near fully functional Control Panel, complete with awesomeness folded into every page. Instead I found myself contemplating which features to drop from the Private Preview Release on Saturday: “I guess we can do without SSH access right now”, “I suppose only offering PHP hosting would suffice, for now”, “I don’t think we’ll need 1-Click installs at the time of release”, “Maybe we can do without database access”, “Do people really need to modify DNS?”. Ultimately today came down to “Can we provide a functional service that will really showcase what we’re doing?”

In end we can’t, yet. A truly huge disappointment; however, when presented with the options to “release soon, release often” or “delay and build a solid product” I ultimately chose the latter. So where do we go from here? Is Ondina to become the next Duke Nukem Forever? I want to take a moment to explain who “we” are and why it’s taken this long to produce a glimpse into the system.

Ondina was born of an old idea which masqueraded as “SeaCrow”. SeaCrow was half-assed attempt at making a web design/web development company which would host it’s clients sites. I teamed up with a good friend of mine, Mason Shelby, to get this done. Ultimately it didn’t pan out as neither of us had the time to truly invest into the idea. What resulted from this was a tool-set and server infrastructure that eventually would be used to build Ondina on. After a lot of scraping and re-tooling a new server infrastructure was devised. Since May 4th I’ve been working on laying the ground work for Ondina based on the trials of SeaCrow bouncing the idea off anyone who would listen. As I gathered more feedback from people and understood more the business aspect of an idea like Ondina, I began to pursue it further.

Early August I asked Stefano Palazzo if he could help with some design aspects. Little did I know how much assistance he would provide. In the time he’s helped with Ondina, Stefano has really helped in creating a solid user experience, but also has helped in a large capacity with security and communications aspects. In a later post I’ll explain exactly how Private Preview Release is setup and our aim for future infrastructure, but his Python experience and insight has been indispensable in getting Ondina as far as it’s come. Without his assistance Ondina would be delayed by months, not days.

The real delay in the project can be traced to one single point of failure, time. When I started Ondina I had one goal in mind: Quality above all else. Because of this I’ve refused to allow investments or outside revenue sources that could lower any portion of quality for Ondina. As a result this project is being entirely financed from my pocket. This includes the servers, development time, everything. As such my current employment position is vital to Ondina’s success, without my job there wouldn’t be any money (though it seems with my job there’s never any time). However, Ondina is designed to reach self-sufficiency quickly after public launch to avoid issues like cash flow and time constraints.

So when does Ondina Private Preview Release start?

We’ll be sending out the first batch of invites sometime before this Saturday, September 10th. From there everyone who signed up prior to the 6th will receive their invitation before the following Saturday. While we expect to be finished within the next few days the remaining days of the week will give us time to make sure everything truly is ready for you and everyone to use!

We look forward to sending out those first invitations and are excited for the future of this project! Feel free to field any comments here or on Google Plus

Again, as we are drawing close to the start of the Ondina Private Preview Release, I begin to question certain design tactics and plans for the launch. What should be available for our private release? What features are most important to have? What should be functional?

One piece of functionality I know for certain needs to work flawlessly is the Feedback Form. Because of this I’ve spent quite some time scoping out how other popular services prod users and take feedback from them. Since the majority of web hosting providers don’t seem to have a way to submit feedback (As cPanel and other Web Control Panels don’t anticipate there being any feedback necessary for their product), I looked into how Google managed feedback from Google Plus users.

Google Plus Feedback

It’s simple: Describe the problem and give users the ability to “highlight” areas of the page to be included in the report while blacking out private details. It has a few drawbacks though. For starters, it’s slow. To even load the interface it takes approximately 45 seconds.  Before submission, there’s a preview step and, finally, the submission. Getting from one step to the other incurs a 30-45 second load time. Like so many other sites that sport a feedback button, this one is located outside of the realm of design: Bottom right of the window. Most sites seem to anchor theirs on the right or left of the page in an off-beat, annoying color.

Well, it's not that far away.

Being a developer, I know nothing about what the average user wants in an interface. If it were up to me, I would hand everyone SSH access and say, “Have at it!” Unfortunately, that really won’t work for everyone, and I know that. With Ondina, I know feedback is going to be the only way to bring Ondina from just another hosting provider to the hosting provider. So I’ve taken some time to build out something that will hopefully make your input and you, the user, the single most important entity to this whole operation! I care what you have to say. In fact, without your feedback I’d be stuck at the gates. As a result, I’ve placed a feedback panel in the control panel. On every page you’ll be able to not only report your good experiences with Ondina hosting, but also exactly how you think your experience can be improved. In addition to providing feedback, you can view all the outstanding issues reported on any page ordered by votes.

I look forward to the Private Preview Release and most importantly your feedback!

As a lot of people know already, I’ve been working on a side-project for the past eight months; however, this is something I’ve been trying to do for almost four years. In that time there have been a lot of hard lessons learned, a lot of failed attempts, and a lot of fun learning and evolving. All of this materializes into Ondina.

Ondina is my 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 Hosting is where I see it at its worst. I’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 of 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, I’ve found a lot of hosts that run older, less secure software, rudimentary configurations, and offer generally crappy 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. They can see everything you do, but there is no way for you to audit your host. 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 their word and trust everything they say.

I’ve been working on a company that operates differently . It operates on an Open Source mentality. If you’re going to pay me and trust me to host your website, whether it’s a personal blog or your company’s portfolio, you have the right to know how we operate, 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: Good Guy status.

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 exactly why your plan is priced where it is. We also plan to publish our entire infrastructure’s layout for review by the community and to show 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 and to always offer the highest quality 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 provide a simple yet powerful control panel with which to 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 to get. Ondina is here to set a new standard in Web Hosting.