Say the number
Latency, uptime and price are published with the measurement method beside them. A figure without a window is marketing, and we would rather cut the sentence than print one.
Company
A hosting company that owns its own machines.
Shardly designs, buys, racks and operates the hardware its customers run on. No reseller margin, no borrowed capacity, no datacentre we have never walked through.
Most hosting companies are resellers. They rent capacity from someone else, put a panel in front of it, and charge a margin for the arrangement.
Shardly does the opposite. We buy the machines, rack them ourselves in facilities we can drive to, and write every layer of software that runs on top — the dashboard, the file editor, the shard supervisor, the billing integration. It is more work and less leverage, and it is the only way to answer “why is my server slow?” with something other than a support ticket to a third party.
That decision sets everything downstream. Because we own the hardware, we can publish real per-core specifications instead of a vCPU count that means nothing. Because we wrote the control plane, a customer’s edge case becomes a commit rather than a feature request. And because nobody outside the company needs a return on their capital, nothing about the pricing has to answer to anyone but the people paying it.
2025
Founded
3
German regions
0
Outside investors
01What we do
Four decisions that make up the whole company.
Shardly is a small business with a short list of convictions. Everything the platform does is downstream of these four.
We own the metal
Ryzen 9 compute, NVMe storage and our own switching in three German facilities. Capacity is bought ahead of demand, so a busy week is a planning question rather than an outage.
We wrote the control plane
The dashboard, the file editor, the shard supervisor and the billing integration are ours. When a customer hits an edge, the fix ships from the same repository — not from a vendor's roadmap.
We bill in short cycles
Billing runs weekly and cancellation is one click, with no retention flow behind it. No annual contracts, no expiring credits, and no sales call standing between a customer and a running server.
We keep the data in the EU
Customer workloads, backups and logs stay inside the European Union. GDPR is the design constraint the platform was built around, not a page in the terms.
02Principles
Six rules we hold to when they are inconvenient.
Principles are only worth writing down when they cost something. Each of these has, at least once.
Small on purpose
Headcount is the easiest thing to add and the hardest to undo. The team stays small enough that the person who wrote the subsystem is the person who answers the ticket about it.
Boring where it counts
Billing, backups and identity are deliberately unexciting and heavily tested. Novelty is spent on the parts customers can see, never on the parts that must not lose data.
No lock-in as a feature
Files stay downloadable, configuration stays exportable, and cancellation takes one click. A customer who stays because leaving is hard is one we have already lost.
Answer as the person who built it
Support is not a separate department reading from a script. Tickets land with the people who wrote the subsystem the ticket is about.
Grow slower than the revenue
Every machine is paid for out of what the business earns. It is a slower way to expand and a much simpler way to decide what gets built next.
03History
From one cabinet to three regions.
Shardly has been operating since 2025. Nothing here was announced before it was running.
2025Q1
The first rack
Shardly starts as a private answer to an ordinary annoyance: hosting a Discord bot meant either maintaining a VPS yourself, or paying a platform that charged as though it were running a company's core systems. The first machines go into a Falkenstein cabinet.
2025Q2
The control plane replaces the panel
The off-the-shelf panel is retired in favour of a dashboard written in-house: a real file editor, per-shard logs, and a deploy path that does not involve an SFTP client.
2025Q3
Weekly billing goes live
Billing moves from a monthly cycle to a weekly one, with extra capacity sold in transparent packs. Cancellation becomes a one-click operation with no retention flow behind it.
2025Q4
Frankfurt comes online
A second region opens beside Discord's European gateway, cutting the round trip for latency-sensitive workloads and giving backups somewhere other than their own building to live.
2026Q2
Nuremberg and the backup vault
A third site adds capacity and an offsite vault, completing a three-region footprint entirely inside Germany.
2026Q3
Shardly HQ
The corporate identity separates from the platform. shardlyhq.xyz becomes the company's front door for press, partners and anyone who needs to know who is behind the machines.
04Company facts
The details, without the adjectives.
Compute + gateway edge
Compute + object storage
Compute + backup vault
Writing about us, or working with us?
Press is answered within one business day and partnership enquiries within two. Everything reaches the same small team, which is the point.