Panelica has been able to run Docker containers for a while now — app templates, compose stacks, per-account isolation. What has been missing is a straightforward way to actually sell that to customers without hand-rolling your own storefront and provisioning logic. That gap is closed: PNLCS, our billing platform, now has a Docker/app-hosting product path built in.
The product is resources first, app second. A customer buys a container plan — memory, CPU, disk — and then picks what runs in it from the app catalogue. That catalogue currently lists 98 applications, with logos and requirements ready to go, and every card in it states two things up front: how much memory the app needs, and how many containers it starts (some apps, like Immich, bring their own database and helper containers along with them — more on that in the practical guide we're posting alongside this one). If a plan can't fit what the customer picked, they're told before checkout, not after the deploy fails.
The Panelica server module in PNLCS supports three ways to package this:
- Hosting with apps included — a normal web hosting plan where the app catalogue is just one more thing the customer can add to their account, same as a database or a mailbox.
- App Hosting — a focused product: pick an app, PNLCS provisions the container(s) and points a domain at it. This is the "I just want WordPress/Ghost/Umami running on my.domain.com" product.
- Container plan with no website — just compute. No domain requirement, no vhost — for customers who want a box to run their own stack on and will manage it themselves from the panel's container terminal.
All three provision through the same Panelica server module that already handles the rest of hosting (files, mail, databases, DNS, backups) from inside the billing portal — so support isn't juggling two separate admin panels for one customer.
PNLCS is MIT-licensed and self-hosted — clone it, run it on your own infrastructure, modify it. There's an official Docker image if you want to be up and testing in a few minutes, and a plain install path if you'd rather run it directly on a server (a Panelica box already has everything it needs — PHP, MySQL, Nginx, Node).
Try it without installing anything first: hosting.panelica.com is our live demo. Documentation is at panelica.github.io/pnlcs, and the source is at github.com/Panelica/pnlcs.
This module is new and the app catalogue is going to keep growing. If you try it — whether that's the demo, a real Docker install, or wiring up your first App Hosting product — tell us what's missing. Which apps do you want added next, which of the three product shapes maps to what you actually sell, and where does the flow get in your way. Reply here or open an issue at github.com/Panelica/pnlcs/issues.
We also posted a practical companion guide on sizing plans correctly and what "isolated" actually means for these containers — worth a read before you put an app in front of paying customers.