About

Why we built this

EmDash is an open-source, Astro-native CMS. It's free to run yourself if you want to manage a server. Most people don't want to manage a server — they want to write and publish content.

EmDash Hosting takes the ops out of EmDash. You fill in a form, and we handle the container, the certificate, the backups, the updates, and the infrastructure. You handle the content.

The CMS is open source

EmDash (the CMS) is open source and free. You can self-host it on any server. EmDash Hosting is a paid managed service that runs it for you — it is not required to use EmDash, and you are not locked in to us.

Every backup from EmDash Hosting is downloadable as a standard .tar.gz. If you want to move to self-hosted, take your data and go.

Host Local

EmDash Hosting is operated by Host Local — a small Australian software company. Sydney-based infrastructure is available by default alongside every other DigitalOcean region.

Charges appear as "Host Local" on your credit card statement.

Infrastructure

Sites run on DigitalOcean droplets. Backups are stored in DigitalOcean Spaces. Payments are handled by Stripe. We don't build our own data centres; we use infrastructure we trust and focus on the product layer.