What We Learned In The First Month Of Building a Website Hosting Platform

We launched Orbiter on January 1, 2025. That makes for a nice, clean starting point for a new venture. It also makes writing posts like this much easier. Let’s take a look back and what we accomplished in January.

The Numbers

For our first month, we grew more than we expected, though paid user growth flat-lined after the initial burst of energy. The trick for us is going to be finding the people who are true fans. Our early subscribers are true fans and they help us spread the word. Those are the exact types of customers we want.

Let’s start with the core stats:

• Total Users: 130

• Paid Users: 6

• Total Sites: 90

• Total Site Versions: 336

Now, let’s look at traffic stats:

• Total Views: 1,640

• Total Visits: 1,210

• Total Visitors: 994

Orbiter websites saw a ton of traffic. Keep in mind, this traffic includes bot traffic to websites deployed on Orbiter.

• Requests: 495,470

• Bandwidth: 14.07 GB

• Visits: 192, 710

• Page Views: 194,550

Orbiter sites are the reason we exist, so it’s fun seeing the traffic numbers. We’ll be refining analytics soon and offering an analytics feature to customers as well. When we do so, we’ll be able to get better data that filters out bot traffic.

The Product

We launched Orbiter on January 1st without the ability to pay us, without the ability to add custom domains, without version history, and without so much of what you see now on February 1st.

However, we launched with what we believed was the most important functionality: get a website online in seconds with a simple upload. This was our SLC (Simple Lovable Complete) approach to building something and getting it out the door for validation and feedback. It worked.

We’ve since launched custom domains, versions, and billing (of course), but so much more.

Team Management

You can invite collaborators to your account and set permissions.

Crypto Payments

Not everyone will care about this, but for those that do, we’re pretty proud of the user experience of paying with crypto.

Site Templates

We want to get to a point where every user has at least one site. To solve for this, we wanted to make it easy for people to launch a site from a template.

Public API

Just because Orbiter is easy doesn’t mean developers don’t want API access. We launched the public API on the last day of January, getting it in just under the wire!

Marketing

In January, we were still trying to figure out who, specifically, we should be marketing to. To be honest, we still are. So, there’s a lot of experimentation happening. Here are the highlights so far:

• Product Hunt Launch

• Hacker News Launch

• Indie Hackers Posts

• Reddit Posts

• Social Media Posts (LinkedIn, Warpcast, X, Threads, YouTube, TikTok)

• Blog Posts (18 posts in 31 days)

What worked? A little bit of everything. We got a tiny boost from a Hacker News post about how we built Orbiter and you can see that for the month, Hacker News was the top referrer.

We wrote a total of 18 blog posts, and while we don’t expect to see impact from blog posts for a while, we do think we’re setting ourselves up nicely for the long game of SEO and AIO (AI Optimization).

Our most popular blog post was about how we use blockchain technology behind the scenes.

What Did We Learn

We learned that content moderation is going to be something we really have to invest in. From our past experience, we knew phishing content would make its way to our platform. And sure enough, it did. We have tools to detect this, but we didn’t realize how fast a domain could get flagged. We had about 5 hours one day where the orbiter.website domain was flagged as malicious.

Fortunately, we were able to resolve that and have a more automated process as well as visibility into how browsers view the trustworthiness of our domain.

Combating pornography is also something we have had to tackle. We do not have automated tools for this, but it is against our terms of use to host pornographic content, so we block and remove that type of material.

More importantly than content moderation is we learned that having true fans is far more important than having a huge, splashy launch. We want people to use Orbiter and love Orbiter. We don’t want people to sign up and leave.

Still, as mentioned above, we’re learning who our ideal customer profile is still. Once we have a solid grasp on that, we can niche our marketing work down to that group and hopefully see better paid traction.

Conclusion

January was a fantastic month for us. We were so happy with the usage, the product, and what we learned. Bring on February!

If you want to host your static websites and web apps the easy way, try Orbiter today.