The moat was never the servers

There was a time when a tiny (mt) in a website footer said something about the person who made it.

It said they cared about design. That they paid attention to the people making good things on the web. That they wanted to be counted among them.

That is a ridiculous amount of meaning to get out of a hosting account.

It is also the part of Media Temple worth remembering now that agents can make websites for people who have never thought of themselves as web designers.

Getting those people online is a useful business. Giving them somewhere they want to belong is a much more interesting one.

A hosting company with a scene

Media Temple understood the creative audience it wanted. Its sponsorships, visual identity and presence around the design community made hosting there feel like a small public statement: I do this for a living now.

The service still had to work. A sticker cannot keep your website online. But the affection people had for Media Temple went well beyond the machinery underneath it. You can hear that in the recollections of designers when the brand closed.

GoDaddy acquired Media Temple in 2013, explicitly identifying its audience of designers, developers and other creative professionals. By 2023, the brand was retired and its customers had been moved to GoDaddy.

The hosting continued. The place people felt attached to was gone.

That is the lesson I keep coming back to. You can keep the infrastructure and still lose the thing people loved.

The next person through the door

Spacefast describes itself as a home for what your agent makes. That is a good starting point because it begins with something the person already has: a thing they want to put on the internet.

The audience I would build around is the person who asked an agent for something and got back a folder. A teacher with a classroom game. A shop owner with a little calculator. Someone who has wanted to make a website for fifteen years and finally can.

They don't have a stack. They have an output.

Hosting has spent years learning how to talk to developers. Build minutes. Edge functions. Preview branches. Cold starts. Those terms have legitimate uses, but put them in front of someone trying to share their first project and you can make a simple task feel like an entrance exam.

Speed matters. Reliability matters. So does making the bill understandable. But shaving another few seconds off publishing is a thin reason to expect someone to feel attached to you.

The bigger opportunity is helping them think of themselves as someone who makes things. Someone whose work belongs on the wall.

Put the work on the wall

I would start with a small, edited showcase.

A handful of things people made that week, with their names attached and a sentence about why each one is worth opening. A useful tool can sit beside a strange little game. A first attempt can earn a place because the idea is good.

A template gallery shows what the company can make for you. A showcase lets you recognize yourself in somebody else's work.

That needs an editor with taste and curiosity. An infinite scroll of thumbnails will not do the same job.

Spacefast's comments pinned directly to a page are another opening. They can be more than a way to report that a button is crooked. They can be the digital version of taping a printout to the studio wall and asking what people think.

Encourage people to share unfinished spaces. Invite a friend in. Ask a question. Come back with a new version. Watching something become itself was a lot of what made the early web feel alive.

And give makers a way to let someone else start from their work. An explicit, optional “remix this space” could turn an intimidating blank page into something a beginner already understands. Change the colours. Replace the pictures. Make it yours. Keep a link to the person who gave you the starting point.

Now publishing has somewhere to lead.

A webring in modern clothes

I would bring back the badge, too.

“Made on Spacefast.” Small, optional, in the footer, with a route to the maker's other spaces and work from the wider community.

A badge should earn its place. Give the maker something worth being associated with and it becomes a way to say I'm part of this. Give visitors somewhere interesting to go next and it becomes useful.

It's a webring in modern clothes.

The physical version matters as well. Stickers. A little printed collection of the year's best spaces. A card you can hand somebody that shows what you made. These things give a project a life away from the tab it was born in.

You cannot manufacture affection by printing merch. You can give existing affection something to stick to.

Somebody has to show up

Community is a set of things somebody decides to do on a Tuesday.

Someone has to notice the interesting project, write the paragraph and answer the beginner's question without making them feel like a beginner. Someone has to spend time in the groups where teachers, hobbyists and small-business owners already talk to one another.

The docs should sound like that person. “Space” and “version” are good words. Explain the next useful action before introducing the machinery behind it. Assume the reader is smart, busy and has never needed to know what a CDN is.

There is a useful model in WordCamps, which local WordPress communities have organized around the world. The lesson is the repeatable habit of getting people into a room to share what they know and what they made.

Imagine a monthly showcase night with fifteen people demonstrating something they published. Help a local organizer get the first one running. Give them a format they can adapt. Keep showing up after the launch excitement wears off.

Then tell the makers' stories properly. Give someone a stage because their work deserves an audience. Being associated with Spacefast should create opportunities for the people using it.

Start small enough to mean it

My first three investments would be the showcase, the optional badge and one person whose job is to know the makers and help them find one another.

That is enough to start. The gatherings, remixes and printed things can grow from people actually wanting them.

Media Temple made people care where their work lived. Spacefast has a chance to make a new generation feel that way about the things they are only now able to create.

The part worth building is a place people tell each other about.

Nobody can copy that in a sprint.