It’s coming up to a full year since I started Vizalo. I made the first commit on the 5th of January 2024 and since then it’s been a busy year to say the least. Since that first commit we’ve launched in the USA and Germany, we’ve launched features such as server metrics, firewall management, easy installs, SSH Key management, and managed apps in a closed beta. There’s a lot more which I’ll go into a bit later.
I think it’s important to quickly touch on why I started Vizalo. I’m not a huge fan of using terms like “mission” but I couldn’t find a better word to describe what I’m trying to achieve at Vizalo. So here goes, I started my career in hosting and fell in love with it. I knew when I left that company I would always be back in the hosting world at some point. One thing I’d learned and observed was that a lot of hosting companies fall into one of two categories. They’re either quite affordable but very complex like AWS or they’re quite niche and more expensive but do what they do very well like someone like WPEngine. There are some newcomers who I have massive admiration for like Sliplane, Railway and Render who I think have broken out of the mold. That’s exactly what I wanted to do: break the mold. I want Vizalo to be an affordable but easy to use hosting company that provides services from the standard VPS to developer focussed deployment to non-technical focussed WordPress hosting. It’s ambitious I know.
Enough about the “mission”, let’s look at what we shipped in detail.
- VPS - We started with shipping standard VPS hosting available in both the USA and Germany. I knew this need to be our first step to help us get started
- Metrics - Shipping the ability for someone to rent a server from us wasn’t enough so we then shipped server metrics so our customers could view how much CPU and traffic their servers was using
- SSH Keys - we needed a way for our customers to easily manage their SSH keys so we shipped the ability to add or remove SSH keys within Vizalo
- Easy Installs - this was a fun weekend hack that made it to prod allowing our customers to easily install popular tools such as Coolify or Dokku. This needs a revamp and will be getting a full refactor in 2025 for sure!
- Firewall management - we like to help with security at Vizalo. We don’t want to leave our customers in the dark so we shipped firewall management to help our customers easily add or remove firewall rules.
- Managed Apps Beta - this one was huge. We wanted to build something that could easily take code from GitHub to production in a few clicks so we shipped managed apps into a closed beta. Managed apps mean we managed the underlying infrastructure and you just worry about the code. You don’t even have to write a Dockerfile if you don’t want to, it can build your application just by scanning the repository. Managed apps still has a long way to go but in 2025 it will be coming out of beta for definite!
- Rebrand - this was a bit left field and only happened after a designer approached me with an amazing mockup for the Vizalo landing page which I then hired him to redesign completely. Honestly, I’m so happy with it. It was a wild ride, and honestly for a one man team I think I got a lot done, which I’m incredibly proud of. Now let’s take a look at some numbers!
- 24 new users joined
- 42 new servers were provisioned
- 100% uptime for all servers across the year
- 32s average for servers to provision
- 815 commits
- 69350 lines of code
- 5 free tools
- 17 free tutorials
- 3 code examples
- 117 technical terms definitions
- 9 managed apps
- 44 app deployments
- 358 Jira cards completed
- 99 tests
- 312 assertions
- 286 automated emails sent
- 17819 queued jobs completed
As we enter our second year in business I can confirm I’m more motivated than ever. I’m doubling down on Vizalo and committed to not buying a single domain in 2025.
What I’ve got in store:
- Entering a new market. This should be no surprise that we want to expand to the UK market and it will happen in 2025. Not exactly sure when but it will happen
- Managed apps out of beta. This is happening and there is going to be a lot more on the way including metrics, cron jobs, and much more!
- Merch - I want to have some Vizalo hoodies or something similar as it’s cool af.
- Dedicated servers - this has always been in the plans but I haven’t got round to it yet
- More content - tutorials, video and who knows maybe even a podcast.
There is more including a new Vizalo managed product but I’m not going to give everything away right now.
That’s it, as we put 2024 into EOL I can say it’s been a blast and I can’t wait for 2025. Happy new year!