PGG wants your servers and invoices on speaking terms

A hosting customer buys a server. Somewhere, a machine starts. Somewhere else, an invoice appears. And when something goes wrong, a support ticket arrives, carrying just enough information to make somebody open another tab. PGG is building software around the distance between those events. The machine matters. So does everything that happens after someone clicks “buy.”

The invoice is part of the machine

PGG, a Lake Forest, Illinois software company, develops tools for datacenter and cloud operators. Its proposition becomes clearer when you consider the hosting provider rather than the server administrator. A provider must provision capacity, meter consumption, collect money, and help the customer. Those jobs concern the same service, even when the software treats them as unrelated departments.

Cloudment puts those activities in one interface. Its advertised scope includes Kubernetes clusters, virtual machines, applications, websites, game servers, and dedicated hardware. Billing and support sit alongside them. The appeal is practical: an operator investigating a customer’s problem should be able to see the service the customer is paying for without reconstructing the relationship across several systems.

That makes Cloudment a candidate for the space between infrastructure administration and the commercial machinery of hosting. A billing product starts with the account. A server panel starts with the instance. Cloudment attempts to hold both views at once. Whether that saves work depends on how well the connections survive an ordinary operator’s day.

A small panel gets a bigger job

The company’s published product history begins in 2017 with a panel for game servers and applications, built using PHP, jQuery, and xterm.js. That is an instructive starting point. A game server is a particular workload with particular users, but it also needs the familiar machinery of deployment, access, and ongoing administration.

Cloudment says virtual machines joined the console in 2021, when it launched privately with hosting partners. Billing and support tickets followed in 2022. Dedicated and bare-metal servers, third-party integrations, and a reseller platform arrived in its account of 2024. The sequence shows a product expanding along the work surrounding a server, rather than simply accumulating more kinds of servers.

“Built by operators, for operators”Cloudment’s description of its origins

The 2022 entry also mentions isolated error boundaries and predictable failure handling. These are revealing priorities for a tool that wants several operational jobs under one roof: a problem in one part of the interface should not make the whole working day disappear. The current early-preview notice puts the broader proposition in its proper context. This is a platform to evaluate against real workflows.

Free has a feature list

Cloudment’s pricing uses the language of supporting a project: choose what feels fair, with a free starting point and suggested monthly contributions. But the useful buying information is in the feature catalog. Specific capabilities unlock at specific support levels. For an operator, the distinction matters more than the invitation at the top of the pricing page.

Billing, support tickets, REST API access, and a custom domain are listed at $22 a month or above. Bare-metal control, customization, and webhooks begin at $60. Ethernet switch control and inventory tracking sit at $260. Enterprise adds arrangements such as private or air-gapped deployment and a dedicated account executive. These are advertised software tiers; they do not establish the cost of the infrastructure underneath.

Hosting providers get the clearest commercial pitch: sell services under their own brand, with their own domain and prices. Homelab users get a different invitation, centered on free tools for games, sites, DNS, and backups. Enterprises are offered audit trails, identity integrations, and facilities-related controls. The common interface serves quite different reasons for opening it.

Two doors into the same data

Obstor, PGG’s object-storage project, makes a narrower argument. Applications can reach stored objects through the S3 API. People and file-transfer workflows can reach the same underlying data through native SFTP. The point is to accommodate existing tools: an application speaking S3 and a person using FileZilla need not begin by learning the same vocabulary.

The project publishes source code under Apache 2.0 and describes a Go implementation. Its documentation lists familiar clients, including the AWS CLI, rclone, WinSCP, and FileZilla. Those are compatibility claims, not a customer roll call. Likewise, an S3-compatible endpoint is a technical interface, not a promise that running your own storage will reproduce every aspect of a managed cloud service.

The container that forgets

The most useful detail may be in Obstor’s Docker quickstart. Start a test container without persistent storage, and data in its container filesystem disappears when the container exits, the guide warns. The persistent example maps a host directory into the container. A small installation choice separates a disposable demonstration from data you expect to see tomorrow.

There are boundaries elsewhere, too. Obstor’s SFTP documentation says that interface does not expose S3-specific features such as versioning and lifecycle rules, and does not support symbolic links. Two ways into the data do not make the protocols identical. Teams with workflows built around those behaviors need to check the fit before migrating.

Follow the handoff

The useful lesson in PGG’s portfolio is to follow a piece of work beyond its first successful action. A deployed server generates usage, payments, questions, and backups. Cloudment gathers the surrounding jobs; Obstor gives existing applications and file-transfer users access to a common store. Both products focus attention on the connections that operators otherwise have to maintain themselves.

For a team already comfortable with separate tools, moving them together has to earn its place. The meaningful comparison is the time spent reconciling accounts, service records, and customer requests across the existing setup.

A sensible evaluation follows that same path: provision a service, record usage, issue an invoice, open a ticket, and restore data. Judge the complete journey. For a hosting business, the interesting unit of software is often the whole customer relationship.