Why I built my own cloud instead of reselling someone else's

"Peel back the landing page of most 'cloud platforms' and you'll find the same thing: someone else's data center, a markup, and a dashboard. I wanted to build the other kind — the kind that owns the metal."

Here's an open secret about the hosting industry: most platforms you deploy to don't run servers. They rent compute from the same three hyperscalers, wrap it in a nicer UI, and charge you for the convenience. Your $5 app is often paying three layers of margin — the hyperscaler's, the reseller's, and the platform's — before a single request gets served.

That works fine, until it doesn't. Prices creep. Free tiers vanish. Egress fees appear on invoices like parking tickets. And when something breaks at 2 AM, your "cloud provider" is opening a support ticket with their cloud provider.

I decided to opt out of that chain entirely.

Renting vs. owning

When a platform doesn't own its infrastructure, every decision it makes is downstream of someone else's pricing model. It can't give you honest per-second billing, because it pays by the hour. It can't promise your app won't share a congested host, because it doesn't control scheduling. It can't keep prices flat, because its own costs are set by a vendor with a captive audience.

Owning the hardware inverts all of that. The economics are simple: steel and electricity in, compute out. No middlemen to feed. That's how Abasthan can run a real free tier (your first app is free), bill per second of actual runtime, and price paid plans at a fraction of what the reseller chain charges — from $1.5/month for a static site and $2/month for a web service.

The build: bare metal, no shortcuts

I started with Dell PowerEdge R720s — unglamorous, indestructible workhorses. Dual Xeons, 128GB of RAM each, racked and wired by hand. Then I built the platform layer the way I'd want it as a developer:

• Proxmox VE for virtualization across the physical nodes.
• Kubernetes for orchestrating customer workloads.
• Harbor as the private container registry.
• ArgoCD for a fully GitOps deployment flow.

On top of that sits an orchestration layer I wrote from scratch: a build worker that turns your Git push into a container image with BuildKit, a log streamer that pipes runtime output straight to your browser, and a billing engine that meters usage by the second. Push to GitHub, and the platform builds, deploys, and scales it — the experience Heroku promised, running on steel I can physically touch.

There's a quiet advantage to a platform built this way: every layer is understood. Nothing is a black box rented from a vendor. When something needs fixing, the person fixing it is the person who built it — not a ticket queue three companies away.

Who this is for

Developers who want git-push deploys without babysitting VPCs, IAM policies, or surprise invoices. Web services, static sites, background workers, cron jobs — connected to managed Postgres, MongoDB, MariaDB, or Redis in a couple of clicks.

Students and side-projecters who need a real app on a real URL for free. Your first app costs nothing and comes with a free subdomain and SSL — no credit card required to start.

Small teams and companies that want predictable bills. Prepaid credits mean the platform can never surprise-charge you: when credits run low, services pause; top up and they resume. Your worst-case bill is a number you chose in advance.

The underdog math

"Abasthan" means home in Bengali — and that's the point. Your app should live somewhere, not be a line item in a reseller's spreadsheet. We're not the biggest cloud. We don't have a hundred regions or a thousand SKUs. What we have is our own hardware, an orchestration layer built by people who answer their own support email, and pricing that doesn't need a calculator to decode.

1. Honest economics: no middlemen, per-second billing, prepaid credits — from $1.5/month, first app free.
2. Real performance: dedicated bare metal, not oversold virtual slices.
3. Radical simplicity: connect your repo, pick a plan, ship. That's the whole workflow.