Introducing Plek.je: Website Hosting for your website or business

Kaperkunde.com launched last month, however the market right now for human built applications and websites is tough, especially given the increasing usability of AI for smaller scale projects which was the bread and butter of the software freelancer.

While I'm waiting for more clients, and advertising my business, I'll be working on my own side-projects under the Kaperkunde banner. And Plek.je is the first one. This website and GoDutch are hosted using Ghost open source software, which because of its excellent search engine optimization, rich content editing, and integrations for payment and subscriptions, I've found to be one of the best ways to quickly launch and host a small business.

Launching and self hosting is possible, but getting it running without a lot of knowledge is difficult and time consuming. For many using a web host is worth it, but even so the price can get prohibitive and the cheaper options leave off important functionality like web analytics, limit customization, for instance Ghost charges $35 / month for a basic hosting + analytics package.

After setting up my own websites, I built a new website and control panel that automates the deployment process (configuration of DNS, email setup, analytics database, content and backup storage) into an easy flow with the hopes that I could enter this somewhat crowded market space with a few strong differentiators:

• Price and Value: Because I'm a one-man shop, and just looking to make some profit for the purposes of retaining my visa, and meeting potential development customers, I can offer more services for less money than many of my competitors
• European Centric: A lot of folks in the EU are becoming more nervous about all the dependencies on US web infrastructure, or want to bring their money more local to where they live.
• User Experience: Having specialized in front end / UX development, I noticed the signup and control experience for website hosting could use some improvement, my goal is to make the plek.je creation and monitoring flow for websites simple and straightforward.
• 1-1 Support: Personalized support from myself (currently employee 1/1) means you get responsive and expert support if anything goes wrong.

Why Plek.je?

Because I wanted to offer free subdomains and email with the hosting plans I wanted a domain that was short, and to the point. Fortunately I was able to find plek.je (6 total letters) that has a perfect meaning in dutch. "Plek" (pronounced like "Plaque") is the word for "Place" or "Spot", and "je" (pronounced like "ye") is the diminutive (small)... Plekje then is the common dutch word for little spot, but it also holds emotional significance as a safe haven, a sense of belonging (I found my plekje).

For the logo, I thought of a hidden spot that I loved to eat lunch at when I was at Meta. It was a spaceship lander like structure created to help make the campus more interesting by their AIR (Artist in Resident) program, most people saw it in the garden, but there was a secret ladder that could take you up to the center where you could hide and do some work or have lunch.

And made a stylized version of it to be more "Spot-like" also painted it Orange to make it more Dutch.