Octohost

What is Octohost?

Octohost is a company I founded with my best friend in 2017. The idea came about as we were setting up custom modded Minecraft servers to play multiplayer online. In order to achieve high performance and low cost, you would need to purchase a VPS server from a cloud provider, have a good understanding of Linux administration, know your way around a terminal and how to optimize the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

This friction created a market opportunity for managed server hosts. However, the incumbent market was dominated by poor quality shared hosting providers that often placed hundreds, sometimes thousands of customers on a single server, leading to poor performance and reliability.

Coming from a web development background, I noticed the parallels with the web hosting industry. New products like Netlify, ZEIT (now Vercel), and Heroku were combining the speed and reliability of deploying web apps on virtualized servers, with the simplicity and ease-of-use of legacy shared hosting. Octohost took the same principles and applied them to multiplayer video game server hosting.

Understanding that some users did not always want or need a full month of service, which was the standard offering in the industry at the time, Octohost pioneered the weekly billing model. Providing a weekly billing model is now a standard option in the game server hosting industry.

Landing Page

The landing page serves as the visitor's introduction to the brand and is our only opportunity to make a positive first impression on potential customers. Working in the video game space, we wanted to create a look and feel that was more playful and fun than traditional hosting providers. We used bright colors, playful animations, and a friendly tone to convey our brand's personality and values.

Order Page

Existing commercial order management software avaliable at the time was designed around the shared hosting model. This required us to develop a custom order solution to support our innovative hosting approach. This also had the added benefit of allowing us to provide a bespoke and branded order experience that was unique from our competitors, who all used the same order management software.

The UI for the order form was built in Webflow, to be exported statically and integrated and deployed alongside our PHP backend.

Instead of having one long order form, we broke the order process into multiple steps. This allowed us to provide a more streamlined and user-friendly experience, while also allowing us to pre-load information about the user's order to the backend API, significantly reducing the time from payment to server deployment.

The Webflow form handled everything up to payment processing, which was then forwarded to a secure hosted payment page.

Internationalization

We targeted customers in three markets: the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. To manage internationalization, we created three identical pages with appropriate locale slugs in the URL. The only difference between the pages was the price and currency on the product options. Upon visiting the website, the user's location is detected and the appropriate page is served. If the user's location cannot be determined or was outside of those three markets, we defaulted to the United States.

Final Design