Hostbox

A hosting company, written down

Hostbox sells web hosting and domain names across Montenegro and Albania. It is the studio's sister company, which makes it the one client whose brief never closes.

The usual shape for a host this size is four systems taped together: a marketing site, a licensed billing panel, a control panel behind a third login, and a spreadsheet keeping score. Hostbox is one application. The storefront, the cart, the invoices, the provisioning, the support desk and the back office that runs the business share a single database and a single identity — so a customer who pays at two in the morning has a working site at two in the morning, and the person running the company can see what that site costs to keep online.

DNS we answer ourselves

Point a domain at ns1.hostbox.me and ns2.hostbox.me and it is served by Hostbox Shield: our own nameservers, running on Bunny's network, so every lookup is answered from an edge location and screened for attack traffic before it reaches the zone. Zones are created when the domain is, with nothing to configure.

Customers who would rather stay on Cloudflare connect their account once, and their zone appears in the same record editor as everybody else's. Two DNS providers, one interface: the difference is ours to absorb, not the customer's to learn.

The half nobody sees

A hosting company is not its storefront. It is the fifteen screens behind it, and those decide whether the business is worth running.

So the back office is not a table generator pointed at the database. Invoices and tickets carry live counts of what is waiting. A service or a domain moves to another account without anyone editing a record by hand. A server is a row with an API key, a monthly cost and the date we started paying it — because a server nobody costed is a server nobody can price against.

Built in the studio's own materials

Hostbox is Next.js and React on the front, Convex for the data and the scheduled work, and Clerk for identity, dressed in Cherry so the storefront, the dashboard and the admin are visibly one product rather than three.

It speaks English, Montenegrin and Albanian with no language segment in the URL: the first visit is guessed from where the request came from, the choice is remembered, and it follows the customer into their invoices and their email.

The rest is deliberately boring. Transactional mail through Resend, product analytics on our own subdomain, live chat for when a ticket would be too slow. A hosting company should be the least surprising thing a customer uses all week.