About Candor Host

Candor Host is run by R Software & Consulting LLC of Jacksonville, Florida — a small, founder-run software company. It was started by an engineer, Phillip Roberts, who got tired of watching the same three tricks define an entire industry:

1. The teaser price. $2.95/month in the ad, $11.99 at renewal, and the real price buried in a tooltip.
2. “Unlimited” everything. Unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth — until the fine print’s “normal usage” clause decides you’ve had enough.
3. Support built to deflect. Tiered reps reading scripts, whose actual job is to close tickets, not fix problems.

None of these are engineering problems. They’re choices. So Candor Host is the same set of choices, made the other way:

• The rate you sign up at is the rate you renew at. Forever. It’s in the Terms, not a promise on a landing page.
• Published limits. Every plan’s real numbers — CPU, memory, storage, IOPS, process counts — are on the platform page, pulled from the same configuration that provisions your account.
• Candid Support: the person who answers your ticket has production access and the authority to fix the problem, with published response-time targets.
• A public status page (status.candorhost.com) that reports the same monitoring we look at — not a marketing widget.

Thirty years of running other people’s software

Phil started hosting websites thirty years ago in Youngstown, Ohio — when getting a site online meant racking the machine yourself and answering the phone when it went down. That part hasn’t really changed; it’s still the job, and it’s still done that way here.

In the years between, he worked in software development for all four of the major technology consulting firms, and has held most of the seats this industry has to offer: developer, system administrator, DevOps engineer, and SRE, as well as Director, Principal, and CTO at firms large and small.

Candor Host is what that experience distills down to. Three decades of watching systems fail — and being the one accountable when they did — is why the limits are published, the backups live on separate hardware, the status page is public, and the person answering your ticket can actually log into the server. None of that is novel. It’s just what you build when you’ve been on call for thirty years and know exactly which corners get cut.

How we operate

We’re deliberately small. The people who build the platform are the people who answer support and carry the pager — there is no support floor reading from a script, and no sales team paid to upsell you inside a ticket. Migrations are done by hand, by us, free (how that works).

The infrastructure is dedicated OVHcloud hardware in the United States that we administer ourselves — the details are on the platform page, in numbers.

The name

“Candor” means frankness — saying the true thing plainly. It’s the standard every page on this site is held to, including the uncomfortable ones: the SLA math, the refund policy, what analytics we run (all of it, listed), and every third party that ever touches your data (subprocessors).

If you find a page on this site where we’ve slipped into marketing-speak instead, tell us. We mean that.