Free and paid hosting for everyone
Chief Operations Officer
2025 — ongoing · operations
Linux · Docker · Node.js
Shipped · in production
What it is
Orihost is a hosting platform built on a simple promise: give everyone a place to run their code. Users host Discord bots and other applications on our servers, free or paid, and I run the operations behind it — the systems, the uptime, and the humans on the other end of a support ticket.
Why it was hard
Free hosting usually means unreliable hosting. Servers fall over, support goes quiet, and users get burned. The challenge was to offer a genuinely free tier without letting reliability or support quality slip for anyone — free or paying.
What we learned first
Watching real customers, the pattern was clear: people don't leave because of a missing feature, they leave the first time something breaks and nobody answers. So operations and support became the product. Reliability and a fast human reply do more for retention than any dashboard.
How it's built
A fleet of managed servers with monitoring on every node, automated provisioning for new instances, and clear operational runbooks so incidents are handled the same way every time. Support sits close to operations, so the person answering you actually understands the system you're on.
What shipped
- Free and paid hosting for Discord bots and applications
- Continuous monitoring across the whole fleet
- Automated provisioning for new instances
- Direct, human support close to operations
- Operational runbooks for consistent incident response
Where it fought back
99.98% uptime
Keeping a mixed free-and-paid fleet online means catching failures before customers do. Continuous monitoring and disciplined incident response keep uptime at 99.98%.
Free without fragile
Offering a real free tier without degrading the paid experience meant careful resource management and clear boundaries — generous, but never at the expense of stability.
Support that scales
As customers grew, support had to stay fast and personal. Tight runbooks and operational clarity let one team answer clearly instead of guessing.
What it did
What I'd tell you over coffee
Reliability is the feature. In hosting, the product isn't the dashboard — it's whether the thing is still running at 3am and whether someone answers when it isn't. Operate like that and trust compounds.