How We Started

Every now and then, a customer asks how a small Swiss company ended up hosting Django websites for people all over the world. The honest answer is: one step at a time, and mostly because we needed it ourselves. Let me take you back to where it all began.

Two friends and a GmbH

In August 2004, Thomas Steinacher and I founded wservices. We were young, curious and a little naive, in the best possible way. We built websites, ran servers for friends and small businesses, and learned every lesson the hard way: at night, with a cold coffee next to the keyboard.

Falling for Django

Then came Django. It was everything we had been missing: clean, fast to work with, and written by people who clearly cared. We started to build our own projects with it, and quickly ran into a problem. There was nowhere good to host them.

Most “Python hosting” at the time was an afterthought, bolted onto a PHP stack. You got cPanel and phpMyAdmin, but no virtualenv, no proper WSGI setup and nobody to ask when your migration went wrong. Running a server of your own for every small project was not an answer either.

So in 2009 we launched djangoeurope: hosting made by Django developers, for Django developers. Every account came with shell access and a setup that just worked.

The first control panel

From the very beginning, our control panel was a Django application. It was built with plain Django templates, a few forms and a lot of love. It wasn’t pretty, but it did its job: you could create your Django project, add a domain, set up a database and a mailbox, all without writing us a ticket.

I still remember the first sign-ups from abroad. Seeing a customer from a country we had never been to choose our little service felt like magic.

Ups and downs

Not every year was easy. Hosting is a business of small margins and long nights. A server doesn’t care whether it’s Christmas Eve when it needs you. Prices for hardware went up, big providers came along with offers we could never match, and some years felt like running just to stand still.

But there were also wonderful moments. Customers who stayed with us for ten years and more. Developers who wrote us that they finally slept well, because their website was in good hands. Each of those messages reminded us why we do this.

A decision

By 2015, it was clear that our control panel needed a big step forward. Our customers deserved something modern, something that could grow with new services. I wanted to rebuild it with an API in the back and a JavaScript front end on top.

There was just one problem: money. With our margins, I could never afford to hire a team of developers in Switzerland. I did the math again and again, and it always came out the same. If I wanted to rent an office and hire three developers, I had to go somewhere where our small profit could pay for it.

So I packed my bags and booked a flight to Vietnam.

How that went, and what I found there, is a story for the next episode.