Adam Smith has spent his whole life in web hosting, and at CloudFest Americas the Enhance co-founder explained how a panel built for his own needs ended up inside large hosting companies. He started his first hosting business as a teenager and later sold it. While it ran, he and his team wanted a panel of their own but lacked the time and money, so after the sale they built it.
Enhance reached the public in 2022 after longer development, and Smith described the early years as a slow burn, since trust takes time in an industry where some incumbents are older than many of its workers. Hosting.com, which he said runs a very large deployment, now puts much of its new business on Enhance.
The conversation turned to a common worry in hosting: licensing fees keep climbing, yet switching panels feels risky for hosts with big client bases. Customers can import a cPanel backup straight into their hosting space, so a host can hand out Enhance accounts and let people move at their own pace. For bulk moves there are APIs, since everything is built API first. He added that the specification is easy for AI to read, so an agent could run the migration, check that each site matches the old one and message the customer for a final confirmation.
Support comes from people, Smith said, with no canned or AI-written replies, and the team helps with migration roadblocks directly. Larger partners get custom pricing, so savings vary, though he said a mass migration could save about 80% over cPanel licensing, then admitted that sounds like a sales pitch. Built-in backups remove the need for add-ons, and he said Enhance has “never raised prices.”
Smith said the roadmap shifts with the market. People are now generating Node.js apps and static sites with AI, some of them replacing WordPress. Next up is an MCP server, added by popular demand, plus more built-in auto installers so hosts need not source them elsewhere. A person who builds an app in Claude Code could ask it to deploy to their hosting, and it would find the right endpoints and guardrails on its own and make sure the app is deployed and working.
