It has been a planned feature right from the start. But many months went by and it sort of became the Duke Nukem of the web hosting world. I’m talking about the freistilbox self-service web user interface, of course. Often requested, often promised, never delivered. Now the time has finally come to prove this mythical creature actually exists!

When we started freistilbox as a two-founder team, we didn’t have the capacity to both build an enterprise-class web hosting platform and run a serious software development project at the same time. So we decided to focus on the hosting platform first and do the customer dashboard “a tiny bit later”. Little did we know that our growing number of customers would keep us busy building new platform features and improving the existing ones for quite a while…

At first, we didn’t worry too much because being in close contact with our customers has been and will continue to be a central aspect of our strategy. In fact, each support request asking for a new website instance was an opportunity to learn what our customers were doing and to help them get started quickly. But with every new customer, it became clearer that this approach could never scale. Not having a self-service interface caused confusion and frustration for our customers and an ever increasing amount of support tickets for our tech team. There was no way around it — we had to make a change.

The name of this change is “freistilbox Dashboard” and we’re launching it today! Simply go to dashboard.freistilbox.com and sign up for a user account.

If you’re already using freistilbox, don’t worry about the fact that when you log in for the first time, you won’t see much. That’s because your new account is not yet associated with your freistilbox resources. So, as soon as you’ve signed up, simply use the support chat button in the lower right to let us know, and we’ll connect your account with your existing hosting resources.

By the way: We plan to add this live chat to our official support channels and we’re using the Dashboard beta phase as an opportunity to put it through its paces.

Beta phase? Yes, the freistilbox Dashboard will be a work in progress for some time. It currently offers only a view of your basic hosting details and you can’t make any changes yourself yet. But we’re already testing its self-service features internally and will make them publicly available in January.

We’re very excited to finally be able to provide you with a customer-friendly web interface that spares you the effort of keeping your own list of website details and sending support requests for every little change. We admit that it’s taken us a long time to get this far, and we apologize for all the inconveniences.

We’re determined to keep our current momentum and will continue adding new features on a regular basis. If you’re curious what we’re working on at any given time, simply visit the public freistilbox Dashboard roadmap [Update 2016-02-22] issue queue and development milestones. We’ll happily consider all your feature requests, so please don’t hesitate to give us feedback and let us know what you’d like to see next!

Do you have any thoughts about the launch of the freistilbox Dashboard? Let us know on Twitter!