A rack in the spare room
A handful of machines you built yourself, and no interest in running enterprise software to keep track of them.
We built this because we needed it.
Vantage is made by HostXtra, a small company in the UK. We manage servers for a living our own and other people's and we built Vantage because we were doing that job badly with a spreadsheet and a folder of scripts.
It started after a laptop went missing. Working out which servers that laptop could still get into meant logging into every one of them and reading a file by hand. The list of servers lived in somebody's head, and two of them weren't on it. That took an afternoon, and it should have taken a minute.
Everything that existed to fix this was built for companies far larger than ours. We wanted one screen that answered "who can get into this machine" and let us change the answer. Once that worked, the rest followed: if there's already a way to talk to every server you own, you may as well use it to run your scripts, check things are still up, and open a terminal when something breaks at midnight.
We use Vantage every day to run our own servers. When something about it is annoying, it's annoying us too, which is the main reason it keeps getting better.
The company
WHO
HostXtra
A small independent team in the United Kingdom. No investors, nobody to answer to but the people paying us.
HOW WE EARN
Subscriptions, and that's all
We're paid by our customers. We don't sell data, we don't sell ads, and there's no free tier being mined for anything.
WHO YOU GET
The people who wrote it
Support goes to the same small group that builds the product. There is no first line, and nobody reading from a script.
IF WE STOP
You can host it yourself
Every tier can run on your own hardware, and your data is exportable whenever you want it. You are not stuck with us.
People with more servers than time.
Two or three people, one estate
Everyone needs access to everything, and everyone needs to know what the others changed. Usually the point where the spreadsheet stops working.
Servers you inherited
Machines set up by somebody who has since left, for a client who now wants a straight answer about who can get into them.
Small providers
Lots of machines, thin margins, and a need to prove access is controlled without buying something priced per seat.
A few things we've decided.
SMALL
We say no to most things
Every feature has to earn its place. A tool that manages access to your servers is one you have to be able to understand completely.
HONEST
The price is on the website
All three tiers, including the largest, can be bought without speaking to anybody. There is no hidden pricing and no "contact us" tier.
OPEN
Bugs are in public
Our issue tracker is open to read. If something is broken, you can see whether we already know about it.
CAREFUL
We take security reports seriously
Report something and you'll hear back from a person within three days. We would much rather you told us than didn't.