Grandhosting

About

Grandhosting exists because most hosting control panels feel like they were designed in 2005 and never updated. The goal was to build something that a developer would actually enjoy using: fast, clean, and with none of the cruft. A customer can go from nothing to a running WordPress site with a custom domain and email in under five minutes.

Architecture

The platform is split across three repositories. The frontend is a Next.js 14 app using server components and TanStack Query for data fetching, with a component library built on Radix UI and shadcn/ui. The API is a Bun-powered Hono server with full OpenAPI documentation auto-generated from Zod route definitions. The base image repo handles Docker configurations for customer WordPress instances.

On the backend, Supabase provides the Postgres database with row-level security for tenant isolation. Redis powers rate limiting, caching, and session management. Graphile Worker handles async jobs like domain provisioning, email setup, and invoice generation with retry logic and dead-letter handling. Stripe manages all billing: subscriptions, one-time payments, invoices, and webhook events.

The API exposes 16 route domains covering billing, domains, emails, invoices, notifications, plugins, security, SFTP, themes, wallets, webhooks, websites, and WordPress image management.

My Role

As a founding fullstack engineer, I’ve touched every layer of the platform. I architected and built the API, and I’m the top contributor on the backend repo. On the frontend, I’ve worked across most of the core flows and pages.

What I Learned

Building a hosting platform taught me how many moving parts sit behind something as simple as “register a domain.” DNS propagation, WHOIS protocols, email deliverability (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), each has its own failure modes and timing constraints. Designing idempotent, retryable workflows for multi-step provisioning through the job queue was one of the hardest and most rewarding parts of this project.