Kepler Technologies AB was founded in 2018 with a desire to provide something new and different with a true focus on reliability, speed and automation. Started by a group of nerdy individuals who saw that no single hosting provider could give us what we needed when launching a new website for our customers. Most hosting providers came with a cumbersome dashboard, lousy support or hard to use interfaces. Therefore, we put our development and design teams to work and created Kepler Hosting.
The name was inspired by the Kepler Space telescope which has had a huge impact on space technology. Likewise, we wanted to disrupt the hosting space by providing an easier and faster hosting experience with better pricing. We are here to push the limits and offer quality WordPress hosting. Nevertheless, we still have a long journey ahead of us. But we love what we do and try to make a difference every day. We set out to create the best WordPress hosting platform measured against our competitors, and we are living our dream.
Previous challenges with hosting providers
When we started planning our platform we wanted to look beyond today’s offerings. To see beyond our competitors to try and find the missing pieces. What would make Kepler Hosting different and how can we build a platform that works for individual end-users, developers with multiple clients and sites as well as agencies with 100+ sites. The problem we faced before launching Kepler was that we had to use multiple cloud hosting providers to deliver our services. We’ve used Digital Ocean, AWS, Google Cloud other WordPress hosting providers etc. But none gave us the nitty-gritty tools and freedom we needed. All missed features that might not be mainstream but important.
We set out to research which platforms others were using. Google Cloud was a popular option, but we wanted a more local solution. We also did not want to be yet another provider in the haystack launching a hosting service on Google Cloud. So we decided to look for a local provider who could give us the extra resources needed to deliver blazing-fast WordPress & WooCommerce hosting. We spent a lot of time researching, contacting and meeting with potential providers.
Our most significant issues were pricing, flexibility and reliability. We were looking for a company who we could grow with. But at the end of the day, there was always something missing making our infrastructure stack hard to achieve. We also looked at an option to host our own hardware at a co-location to get exactly the services we wanted but at a smaller scale. However, this proved way too expensive.
After trying a few cloud services out there, we stumbled upon UpCloud and made a few comparisons. With many similarities to our values at Kepler Hosting, we felt immediately familiar with the way UpCloud runs things. And to top it all off, we learned that UpCloud was planning to expand its network in Sweden in the near future which sealed the deal!
Hosting on UpCloud
Kepler Hosting is using UpCloud as our base “server & datacenter” provider. We run our services using powerful containers with just the right amount of resources for a set number of sites. Then we add our infrastructure on top without revealing our trade secrets.
Each site when created from our Kepler Base portal gets a dedicated container that is deployed automatically on UpCloud’s Cloud Servers. We also use the UpCloud Object Storage among others for our backup, migration, staging and restoring. Each server has its own object storage where we manage our backups with the highest security and availability. To be able to offer our clients the best performance, we have different configurations depending on whether the site runs WordPress or WooCommerce. We use UpCloud’s MaxIOPS storage for best performance.
With our in-house developed central and global load balancer, we manage API and private networks to give our end users the best hosting experience. Additionally, we have integrated the UpCloud API into our systems to minimise any human error that can happen when spinning up, resizing or updating cloud servers. This has also saved us a huge amount of time when it comes to expanding our network. With just a click, a few lines of text and some hours of internal testing we can expand our capacity in a data centre or launch in a completely new region!
Improvements
We have definitely been able to improve our services by using UpCloud. The easy-to-use yet advanced control panel helps us manage everything. And the stable and reliable UpCloud API enables us to connect to our infrastructure to fully automate the process of scaling our services. We now also have the freedom to attach multiple storage devices to a single cloud server.
Thanks to the improvements, we are able to deliver faster application load and response times. We have also maximised the efficiency of our servers which has enabled us to build a lightweight infrastructure that powers our client websites with exciting results. And it does not stop there. As a hosting provider, we are always pushing the limits to increase performance and improve every site hosted on our services.
We are very happy to have found UpCloud. Their cloud services fit perfectly into our business model and offer a great balance of performance versus price. This gives us an edge in our line of work along with the flexibility and freedom to grow, upgrade and even downgrade if needed. So far we have not had any server issues or downtime in the few months since we went fully in production on UpCloud. Their support is great and having a team directly integrated with our Slack channel has been a big help.
Future plans
At Kepler Hosting, we are always looking for ways to further automate our services and minimise the possibility of human error. We aim to have a fully automatic system for both the end-user as well as our support and sysadmin team. Kepler is a small team and every hour we can spend on improving our platform instead of daily management will help us grow at a rapid pace. We are currently integrating new UpCloud features that will be launching in a few months, including things like pricing and billing management. If we can automate these, we can be sure to give our clients even better pricing.
We would like to see more capacity in the UpCloud Object Storage. The current 1 TB limit per instance is a bit low for our use case, and we need to utilise multiple Object Storage instances. Additionally, for larger users, a pay-as-you-go storage solution or additional packages of 3-5 TB would also be nice to have.
