The hosting business: overview
This section is for the people at a hosting company who turn Exponential hosting into a product: product managers, sales and marketing, and the managers who sign the service terms. It answers: what can an Exponential hosting offer contain, which commitments can a host reasonably make, how can it be priced and billed, how is it marketed truthfully, and what does the license allow?
Note
None of these pages states a price, a response time or a capacity figure. The project's sources do not publish any, and every host's costs are different. The pages give you the options, the questions that decide between them, and templates with placeholders to fill in from your own measurements.
Pages in this section
| Page | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Designing hosting plans | the building blocks of a plan, plan templates for shared, VPS, dedicated and managed offers, and how to set limits from measurements |
| SLA options | the commitments a host can offer, what each one depends on technically, and an SLA template with placeholders |
| Support tiers | support levels as options, the boundary between hosting support and application support, escalation to the project |
| Billing and metering options | flat, tiered and usage-based models, and what Exponential and the server can measure for each |
| Marketing Exponential hosting | the facts you can use, claims you must not make, naming rules, landing page and launch checklist |
| Partner programs | how a host relates to 7x, the Exponential Foundation and the community, and what is documented today |
| Working with the project and 7x | reporting bugs and security issues, contributing fixes, sponsoring, staying informed about releases |
| Licensing for hosts | what the GPL v2 or later means for hosting customer sites, images, installers and changed code |
The business in one paragraph
Exponential is free software under the GNU GPL v2 or later: "Using Exponential under the terms of the GNU GPL is free
of charge" (README.md). A host pays no license fee per site or per server. What a host sells is the work around
the software: a server prepared for it, installation, updates, backups, monitoring, security, support and, if it
wants, development and migration services. 7x itself offers managed hosting ("Exponential Website Hosting" and
"Exponential Platform SSD Hosting", Who is 7x?); other hosts are free to
offer the same.
Where to start
- Read Designing hosting plans with your system administrator.
- Decide what you commit to with SLA options and Support tiers.
- Check every marketing sentence against Marketing Exponential hosting and the Brand and naming rules.
Related pages
- Hosting companies: start here
- Choosing a hosting model
- Licensing explained for buyers
- Positioning and value proposition
- Free documentation: this page is free to copy, translate and improve under the GNU FDL 1.3.
Become an Exponential Partner
Partners share their information, provide funding, contribute back and develop the products with us, and that is how Exponential grows. A partner website and dashboard are planned for mid-2027: please become a partner today to speed up our growth rate and land new features faster.