Recently, we featured offers from Virtbase, and we noted many things this company does right: it’s own self-developed control panel for VPS operations and billing, no KYC, thoughtful abuse handling, an API for backups, custom ISO, IPv6, and more.  They tick all the boxes.  We had a chat with Janic Bellmann, founder and managing director, about their story so far and where they’re headed.  This looks like a really neat company and we think you’ll enjoy learning a bit more about them.  Let’s dive in!

Q: Let’s start with a little background. What’s Virtbase’s story so far?

It actually goes back to November 2023. A close friend of mine, Dominic, and I have always shared a passion for gaming and system administration. A few years earlier we had run an internet radio station called SynexitFM, complete with self-built TeamSpeak and Discord bots for tuning into our streams. Since Discord and TeamSpeak sit so close to gaming and game hosting, expanding into that area felt like the natural next step. Pterodactyl was gaining popularity at the time, so we started hosting game servers for ourselves, and eventually I began developing the first version of our own panel. Because it was meant for a gaming community, we settled on the name “BeastHost” – which is still the legal name of the company – and hired a designer on a tiny budget to draw us a “beast” mascot.

Back then I had almost no experience with TypeScript or Next.js. I had written Discord bots with discord.js, but never anything of that size. I started studying computer science around the same time, and my skills grew from there, with a lot of help from YouTube, GitHub projects and tutorials.

The problem was that I was never satisfied with what I built. I started over again and again – changing features, themes, core parts, at some point the entire stack. The Pterodactyl API gave me a lot of trouble; it was simply not developer-friendly, and I grew frustrated with it. By December 30th, 2024, I was more or less finished – and then my disk failed and large parts of the project were gone. I couldn’t recover them because the BitLocker keys were missing, and I didn’t have a backup on GitHub either.

Around that time we also decided the name was silly and changed it. That’s when Virtbase was born. I had been working heavily with Proxmox during my studies, so I dropped Pterodactyl from the plan entirely and moved to VMs instead. I set myself one final mission: start once more, and this time finish. After about six months of work, on October 18th, 2025, I finally had the courage to put the beta online.

To get feedback we launched with very small plans – 99 cents for 1 GB of RAM – and posted a single German-language video on TikTok. Overnight it somehow went viral and we had our first 100 users. I was incredibly grateful. We had finally finished something, and I knew the platform was actually useful and not just a waste of time.

Q: Your open source hosting and billing panel is quite an undertaking. What was your motivation? Was it to eliminate fees (for Solus, WHMCS, etc.) or to have more control or something else?

First and foremost, we wanted full control over our software. The issue with proprietary software is that you buy a license to use it, but you never really own it. It also rarely supports exactly the features you need, and there is no single solution that fits every business. So you end up chaining several products together – and every link in that chain is something that can break.

Transparency was just as important to us. We want every user to be able to see what is running in the background and what actually manages their servers. In the end, that’s simply a form of trust.

Q: Naturally in 2026 we have to ask: is it vibe-coded? Of course, you’re using AI because everyone does now, but what’s the development process look like?

I wrote the software entirely on my own as a solo developer. When the project started, AI as we know it today didn’t exist – it simply wasn’t capable of designing an entire architecture or application. So no, I wouldn’t call it vibe-coded, and even today I don’t think you can describe all the details a system like this needs in a single prompt and get a usable result back.

We do use AI now to implement further features, but every change is peer-reviewed by a human. On top of that we run an extensive testing and code-quality pipeline with security scanners, end-to-end tests and unit tests, and larger changes go through a staging environment before they reach production.

One side effect of working this way is that we’ve started building our own tooling for it. Testing a hosting panel is hard, because every real feature eventually has to talk to an actual Proxmox node, and you don’t want an AI agent – or a junior developer, for that matter – experimenting against production. So we built Proxbase, an open-source tool available at github.com/virtbase/proxbase. It lets you spin up local Proxmox nodes on demand during development and connect to them with a single command. Our AI tooling uses it to create a throwaway node, implement and test a feature against it, run security checks, and tear it down again. That way changes are tested against real Proxmox APIs rather than mocks, and nothing ever touches customer infrastructure until it has passed review and the staging environment.

Q: One of your panel’s features is that it’s also manageable from Discord. Do you see a lot of use of that feature?

The acceptance rate is high – roughly every third user has at least linked their account and tried the integration. Many use it just to check the current state of their server, but you can manage almost everything from Discord. Security- and account-related actions are the exception; those still redirect you to the customer portal.

Q: Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment: how does having your own panel translate into something that would make a potential customer choose Virtbase over another host? As an end-user, maybe all I want is a VM in the Netherlands and I don’t care that much about what panel I use to administer it as long as it works.

You’re right – some people just want a server that works, and that’s fine. But maybe it’s just me: I can’t stand the look and feel of the usual off-the-shelf panels.

We work really hard on making the whole experience simple from start to finish. Take firewall rules: with many providers you either have no option at all, or you configure everything by hand inside the server. With us, you add a rule in the panel, see the existing rules from inside the server, and get recommendations and security hints about your firewall right in the customer area. Or take data portability: with most providers you don’t know what they store about you, and getting a full copy is painful. With us, you can read the entire source code and request a secure copy of your data instantly.

Our goal is to provide the experience people actually want – and to build something new rather than copy what already exists.

Q: You are proudly swimming against the KYC tide. Seems like more and more hosts want users to upload identity documents. Do you think this is going to become the norm in the industry in the future? What is your outlook on this unpleasant trend?

Yes, it is becoming a trend. User-generated content is exploding thanks to AI, and I understand why governments want guidelines for labeling such content and identifying who distributes it.

Our stance is, and will remain, that we store as little information as possible while staying compliant with German and European law. We do not require users to upload any documents. The only thing we have to keep is billing information so that we can pay our taxes correctly – and we don’t verify that against identity documents.

At the same time we have to protect our infrastructure from attacks and malicious actors, which means analyzing our network and traffic. All of that can be done pseudonymously by looking at IP data and traffic flows – ports, data rates and so on. There is no need for strict KYC to run a safe platform.

I think this exact KYC problem is why many providers lose customers. But the bigger your platform grows, the more regulations you have to follow. At some point it stops being about what you want and becomes what you’re forced to do.

Q: Right now you’re only able to bill customers in the EU-27. Will you be expanding into UK, US, etc. in the future? And is that limitation based on the work to integrate accounting and tax rules with your custom panel?

We’re already looking into ways to extend billing beyond the EU, and yes, the limitation comes mainly from tax regulations rather than the panel itself. We have to register for and pay tax in the country the customer buys from. Within the EU there is the One-Stop-Shop, a standardized system where we report and pay VAT for all member states once per quarter. Outside the EU it gets complicated quickly – in the US, for example, we would potentially need to register and remit sales tax in all 50 states depending on the product. 27 countries through one system versus 50 states in a single country. At our current size the integration simply isn’t worth it yet.

Q: From a provider’s perspective, I have to imagine that accepting crypto means dealing with a very volatile currency. How do you mitigate the fact that Bitcoin, etc. fluctuate so wildly?

We can’t mitigate the market itself. We settle into a stablecoin, which doesn’t fluctuate much, monitor the market and exchange our holdings regularly – sometimes that means a small gain, sometimes a small loss. We’ve accepted that as the cost of offering services without KYC, which matters more to us.

Q: You’re in the Netherlands at the moment. Any plans to expand elsewhere?

Our plan is to keep prices affordable long-term, and we can only do that in a data center with clear, predictable pricing.

We’ve talked to a lot of data centers about costs, and we initially started out at Maincubes FRA1. Since the COVID pandemic, prices in the big data centers have skyrocketed, and with the current economic situation – AI demand – and the political situation in our home country Germany, running in one of the major facilities just isn’t viable for us.

The SkyLink Data Center has a very good connection, and latency to the surrounding region is almost identical to other data centers – most people won’t notice a difference. If you need the absolute lowest latency for gaming, you might prefer a more local location, but for the broad customer base it doesn’t matter.

We plan to expand to additional data centers once pricing stabilizes a bit and our customer base grows.

Q: What else should our readers know about Virtbase?

Virtbase is a small, honest operation run by people who actually use their own product. The whole stack – panel, billing, Discord integration – is open source, so you never have to take our word for how your server is managed or what we store about you. We don’t ask for identity documents, we accept crypto, and we try to keep entry-level plans cheap enough that you can just try us out without thinking twice.

We’re still young, and there are rough edges. If you find one, tell us – on Discord, by email, or as a GitHub issue. A surprising amount of what’s in the panel today started as a user suggestion, and that’s exactly how we want to keep building it.

Thanks, Janic!  And good luck on future endeavors.  If you’d like to learn more about Virtbase, check out their web site.  If you’d like to get a great deal on a VPS in the Netherlands, check out their recent offers.

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.