TRACT

TRACT is a cloud hosting company providing virtualisation services. The technical product itself runs on standard hosting infrastructure; the differentiator is the customer-facing layer — a portal where customers can browse services, sign up, configure their accounts, and manage their billing entirely on their own.

Building that kind of self-service experience meant doing custom work on both ends. On the infrastructure side, the portal connects to the underlying hosting platform APIs — so when a customer creates a service, configures a virtual machine, or scales an existing service, those actions flow through to the platform without anyone in the office in the middle. On the billing side, Stripe handles the financial layer: subscriptions, recurring billing, payment reminders, dunning when cards fail, and the rest of the long tail of payment-processing edge cases that have to be right for a SaaS-style hosting business.

The visual side carries TRACT's branding through the entire experience — the customer portal feels native to TRACT rather than an obvious bolted-on third-party billing tool. Email notifications, payment reminders, and account communications all run through the same branded experience.

The build sits in the same broader space — automated hosting platforms with proper client portals — that I went on to take much further with PHAS in the years that followed.