Introducing Kolo: one suite for managed WordPress hosting on Enhance

Dusan

Hi everyone,

I'm working on Kolo, a hosted suite for hosting companies that sell managed WordPress on Enhance. It covers provisioning, billing, a branded client portal and support tickets, and it talks to the Enhance API directly, so there's no module to install or patch. I run my own Enhance cluster too.

What's planned for version 1:

Customers, subscriptions and WordPress sites created in Enhance as soon as an order is paid, with a nightly check that Kolo's records match Enhance
Card payments through Stripe, paid into your own Stripe account, and bank transfers recorded against invoices
Billing cycles from monthly to three years, with US sales tax by state and EU VAT, including reverse charge with VIES checks
A client portal on your own domain with your logo and colors, automatic SSL, and one click sign in to WordPress admin and the Enhance panel
Support tickets from email, with replies sent from your own address
Import of clients, products, services and invoice history from WHMCS
Any Enhance plan works, so email hosting and other sites sit alongside your WordPress plans
After launch: a mobile app, a knowledge base system/tool for your customers, and SMS notifications.

I'm still planning Kolo (although an internal working version for my own network is already running), and I'd like to shape version 1 around what Enhance hosts need. A small pilot comes first. People on the waitlist get access to version 1 before anyone else, plus a founder deal: one of a limited number of lifetime deals, or 50% off a subscription for life.

Join the waitlist: https://trykolo.com
Feature survey (about 6 minutes): https://forms.gle/zZVhbJFXp7eiz1j88

Kolo is an independent product. It isn't affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with Enhance.

Happy to answer questions here.

Dusan, Kolo

Dusan

Hey, everyone!

Just a small update that we started deploying the system to a testing infrastructure where you'll be able to test it yourself. Both USA and EU regions will be available for setting up your environment.

More info to come in the upcoming days.

Cheers!

Andrei

Cool idea, good luck with that. My feedback for you is that most owners I know will not use a hosted version of anything this critical, they will prefer to self-host on their infrastructure.

Dusan

Andrei

Hey, Andrei! Ofc, and that is what is in the works, too. The hosted version is coming up now due to ease of testing, without too much setup.

We're in the hosting business for about 15 years and well aware of the importance of the self-hosted version. 🙂

JohnB

Dusan Upmind has no selfhosted option and has customers despite their garbage support and interface limitations. A lot of people are okay with mission critical pieces not being self hosted.

Dusan

JohnB

And I agree completely. There are people that don't want to go with (from their perspective and how they used to work) self-hosted option and have to maintain and support everything on their own, and prefer the hosted version in this case.

This is why we're going to cover both. Especially in today's environment it's a nobrainer.

JohnB

Dusan One piece of feedback I'd have is to put the price on the website as soon as possible. The 50% discount is nice but doesn't mean much without a price.

Someone interested might like the site and the concept but won't join a waitlist or look at an early release without a set price. Why spend the time testing just to find out the price is unreasonable (in their mind).

Btw +1 for using Astro

Dusan

JohnB

Thanks for the suggestion! And it makes sense. The thing is, we're still not sure about the pricing. But we are sure we're not going to impose any limitations like other systems do (# of servers, # of clients, etc).

We did include a pricing question in the survey we shared in the og post at the top, and we'll take the feedback into account.

Dusan

Quick question for everyone that would use this system once it's out: Is an MCP something you'd like to see implemented and use on a daily basis?

CamielK

Dusan
A read-only MCP might be useful for us in the future but is not a must-have for the billing system.

For us it's more important to have a good API that makes it possible for us to code our own integrations to connect to our accounting software or a PSP that is not Stripe.

I already asked for other PSP support (Mollie) in your feature survey when I filled it in.

Dusan

CamielK Yup, and thank you for providing the feedback, much appreciated!

Mollie is moved up in the roadmap and is being worked on. I have small request for those of you who use Mollie: can you provide a dev access through your account and an API for us to test the integration? Since we're currently running an USA LLC only, we can't signup with them. We've reached out to their support for an dev-only access, but they've been slow to follow back.

@yangsheep Thanks for your feedback! I can partially agree with your post, and we'll honor some of the requests. But I'm not following you on this one: "...build functionality similar to Zenbu, where users can simply upload their files, and your system automatically provisions a hosting account through an API..."

@jeffuk yup, that's coming up. 🙂

yangsheep

Hello,

First of all, I apologize for using GPT to translate my message into English.

I've experienced the AWS outage that affected Ploi.io and also seen incidents such as the xCloud supply chain issue. When a control panel provider experiences an outage or security vulnerability, its services may become unavailable for an extended period. This can have a significant impact on hosting businesses, especially in terms of service reliability and customer trust in payments.

There are already solutions on the market, such as Paymenter.org, Upmind, and various self-hosted control panels, that offer similar services.

As for myself, earlier this year, I developed an entire sales system built on WordPress, using my own custom checkout and payment processing workflows.

In addition to selling standard web hosting plans, I've implemented several features, including:

Template website sales (automatically cloning pre-built websites)
CDN services
Automatic DNS configuration
One-click login (SSO)
Affiliate and commission systems
AI-powered website creation (launching soon)
My goal is to build a complete ecosystem of automated sales and service provisioning.

What I'm trying to say is that if your system focuses only on billing and payment collection, it may be difficult to establish a strong competitive advantage.

I believe you need to offer deeper integrations and help your users automate more of their business operations through your platform. That's what will make your product more attractive and valuable.

For example, you could build functionality similar to Zenbu, where users can simply upload their files, and your system automatically provisions a hosting account through an API, connects their GitHub repository, or even sets up a Node.js environment and installs the necessary npm packages.

Features like these could significantly strengthen your competitive advantage and differentiate your platform from existing solutions.

Of course, this is just my personal opinion and some suggestions based on my own experience.

I hope you find them useful!

jeffuk

What about reporting, forecasts, CSV exports for external accounting audits etc?

CamielK

Dusan
Sorry for my late response. I will contact Mollie and try to make a new empty profile with a test API key. Will come back to you with this.

Dusan

Just a quick update: we're closing to a first public release (in a week or so) and I'll post an update here for eveyrone that are interested in testing.

We made a shift and will focus on self-hosted version exclusively, with an option for a managed hosted option maintained by our team. This is based on the feedback we've received so far.

I'll keep you all updated.

Dusan

CamielK

Thank you so much!

CamielK

Dusan
I have an API key ready for you. Let me know where to safely send it to you.

Dusan

CamielK

That was quick. 😃 use this: https://cloakbin.com/share-api-keys

It's a test/sandbox API key, right? Just to make sure it doesn't mess up with some real data.

Any sandbox dashboard, too, or not?

Thanks again, brother!

CamielK

Dusan
Great, I will send the CloakBin link to your e-mail.
Will include the rest of the info in the e-mail.

Edit: 17:50 UTC+0 mail sent