CloudCat has closed down.

On the 1st of November 2024, CloudCat has closed down. After 11 years of webhosting, webdesign and technical support, it's time to shift focus.

CloudCat never was a big player, but it reflected a passion for the web. I worked¹ to make sure that CloudCat offered what I would have wanted to purchase: webhosting done the modern way, fully secure and managed, fully ready for the future.

CloudCat offered a mix rarely seen in other providers: managed webhosting, with standard DNSSEC/TLSA/DANE for your domains, DMARC/DKIM/SPF for your mail and IPv6, TLS 1.3, HSTS and HTTP/2 for your site. It likely was the most modern webhosting you could buy.

The shadow side

All of this had a downside: cost, mostly paid in hours.

Default panels like DirectAdmin, Plesk and CPanel come from the early days of the web and are built on scripts accumulated over the years. I had to do it the manual way, manually updating software, configuring every site's DNS to have all of these nice standards enabled and manually registering and transferring domains.

Besides, I also supported many different kinds of sites and workspaces, such as both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, as well as Python, PHP and Node.JS custom apps and pre-built applications such as Directus and Nextcloud.

While I did that with passion for a long time, it wasn't sustainable, especially if I wanted to grow the customer base to make it profitable.

Options

Together with a friend², I did some market research and investigated the options: was there enough interest in modern webhosting to continue?

The answer, sadly, was no. While everyone wants their webhosting to work well, few are willing to pay for it. The market is dominated by big players, competing on cost and getting acquired to create even larger blocks. The Dutch webhosting space is dominated by Your.Online and team.blue, who both raise prices frequently³. There certainly was space to be a price-fighter, but not to ask a little more for technically superior hosting.

Conclusions

That answer didn't fit me. I kept the prices low (with prices between €4,50 and €13,- per month per customer), offering unlimited disk space and bandwidth and only differenciating on support. Lowering the prices to compete wouldn't work with the manual time I had to put in and raising it to cover costs of creating a technically advanced automated solution would make it too expensive for the market.

Therefore, I concluded that it was better to close down CloudCat for now. All customers got an individual email with advice on where to go next and a free transfer to a webhost of choice. After this was completed, the servers went offline.

Interested in webhosting?

If you are interested in webhosting, I can recommend going to Cloud86, which was my migration partner of choice. Cloud86 is an independent Dutch webhost, not part of any blocks, with reasonable pricing. They support most of the technical features using the Plesk Obsidian panel, which is the most modern of the three panels. They can assist you with configuring DMARC/DKIM/SPF, HSTS and HTTP/2, but they do not yet offer IPv6. For DNSSEC, you will need to email their helpdesk at support@cloud86.io.

You can sign up for Cloud86 using the button below (don't worry, you can look around first) or by mentioning my affiliate code 66f93a9cd2cb7 to the helpdesk on signup.

Go to the Cloud86 website to view their offer

Footnotes

1. Thank you Evelien for your volunteer help starting CloudCat, creating the visual identity and joining me for some of the webdesign. ↩

2. Thank you Ezra for your volunteer help with the market research. ↩

3. As can easily be confirmed by filtering Tweakers news on any of the companies in the blocks, such as Versio, Neostrada or TransIP. ↩