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Why we built our own platform
The story behind our infrastructure choices, and why we run our own hardware in the UK.
When we started designing DynHost, we had two options: resell an upstream provider's platform, or build our own. We chose to build our own. Here's why.
The case against reselling
Most small hosting companies resell a wholesale provider (BuyVM, Hetzner, OVH, etc.). It's faster to launch and cheaper to operate, but it comes with trade-offs:
- Support escalations are slow. When something breaks, you're depending on your provider's support team, who don't know your customers.
- Customisation is limited. You can change your brand, but you can't change the underlying platform.
- Pricing is fixed. Your margins are squeezed every time the upstream provider changes its prices.
The case for owning
Building our own platform takes more time and money up front, but it pays off in three ways:
- We control the support experience. When a customer has an issue, our engineers know the platform inside and out. No tier-1 escalations, no copy-paste replies.
- We can customise. We can tune the platform to our exact specifications — kernel parameters, control panel versions, default PHP runtimes, the works.
- We can offer better pricing. No reseller margin means we can keep prices honest without cutting corners.
What "our own" actually means
We don't own the datacenter — that's Contabo's job. But we own:
- The cPanel and WHM configurations
- The monitoring and alerting
- The backup and restore processes
- The incident response procedures
- The relationship with the underlying infrastructure
And critically, we own the support experience. Every ticket is answered by a DynHost engineer, not an upstream provider's tier-1 team.
The trade-offs
Building our own platform is more work. We have to handle provisioning, monitoring, backups, security, and updates ourselves. It means we can't launch new products as quickly as a reseller. But for the kind of hosting we want to offer — fast, reliable, hand-crafted — it's the only way.
If you want to know more about our infrastructure, check out our features page.