Hello!

---

2025-11-22

Welcome to Hosted on a Toaster. This is a blog about nothing in particular that exists to demo the hosting at Tachi. What's that? It's the hosting op I run as a side project for fun. Because I'm weird and think web hosting is fun.

I used to run a web hosting company for a few years and kinda miss it. I was never big on making sites, but making them work. Even as a little kid I had this interest! Ever heard of Cyber Nations? I used to host the forums for a few alliances on Media Temple's much-missed Grid shared hosting.

I lost a lot of my spark at some point and want to get it back. So this is the start of that.

So... who are you?

I'm Nathan. I'm (asks Siri) 31 (oh god). I've been out of it for a few years and have slowly been getting accustomed to the current state of web hosting. And it's pretty bleak. A lot of Squarify, a lot of vibe coding, and a lot of PE gobbling the rest up. cPanel, Plesk, WHMCS, and SolusVM have since been bought by a single malicious entity. That's the entire cornerstone of the indie hosting scene right there. Not a fun thing to come back to.

But we have viable alternatives now! Enhance is a modern hosting stack that is easier to use than cPanel, does cool stuff, and doesn't cost an arm and a leg. I've grown to really like it. There's still software like Clientexec and Blesta, but also cool SaaS options (I know) like Upmind. I'm not rich, so the duo of Enhance and Upmind are what makes this dream doable in 2025. And of course trusted veteran Hetzner is still around and offering beefy servers on the cheap. I've cut some of the fun budget and spend under $100/mo on this setup.

Will it work? Will I get customers? No idea. Even one weirdo with a feet site will make me happy. This isn't being done for profit, which means I don't have to worry about breaking even. I just want to have fun again.

Cheers.