What is a vessel? Marina's words, in plain English

Sign in to Marina for the first time and the sidebar greets you with a Harbor and some Vessels. If your first reaction is “I just wanted to host my app”, this post is for you. Every word in the product, explained in plain English, in the order you will meet it.

A product that invents words owes its users a clear definition of each one. Every name in Marina means exactly one thing, and here is the full list.

Marina

A marina is the place boats live: they are kept there, looked after there, and set out from there. That is the product in one image. Your sites, apps, databases, domain and email live in one place, get looked after, and face the open internet from it.

Harbor

The Harbor is your dashboard’s front page: one map of everything you run and how it connects. Your apps, your databases, the lines between them, your sites and domains around them. You can drag the map around and arrange it how you like.

Plain English: the overview.

Vessels

A vessel is a running application. Your API, your Next.js app, your bot, your backend. You hand us the code, from a GitHub repo or a container image, and it comes back as a URL that is live on the internet.

You pick a size (how much memory it gets), you pay monthly for that size from your wallet, and you can resize later. Push to your repo’s main branch and the vessel updates itself.

Plain English: an app.

Sites

No metaphor here. A site is a static website: HTML, CSS, a folder from your site builder, a zip you drag in. It goes live at your own address in seconds, and your first one is free. Most businesses on Marina start here, and plenty never need anything else.

Databases

Also no metaphor, deliberately. A database is where your app’s data lives, separate from the app itself, because vessels keep their data light and replaceable while databases keep it safe and permanent. We run SQLite, Postgres and Redis for you. Your first SQLite database is free, and attaching one to a vessel takes one click: the connection details appear in your app’s environment, nothing to copy by hand.

Domains and Email

Your name on the internet, and mail at that name. yourbusiness.com, and you@yourbusiness.com. You can buy a domain inside Marina or point one you already own.

Wallet

The wallet is how everything gets paid for: prepaid, topped up with Mobile Money, spent in cedis. Every site, vessel, database, domain and mailbox draws from it, and the ledger shows exactly where every pesewa went. There is no card on file because there is no card. When the wallet is empty, things pause; they do not surprise you with a bill.

Plain English: your balance.

Why boats at all

We could have shipped a product where apps are “compute units” and the dashboard is a “resource console”. Those words are precise and dead. The harbor picture is doing real work: it says your things are berthed somewhere that looks after them, and that the point of a vessel is to be out on the water, reachable by anyone.

But a metaphor should cost you nothing. So the rule we hold ourselves to is simple: every named thing means exactly one thing, the plain word is never far away, and if a name ever makes the product harder to understand, the name loses. You can use Marina forever saying app, overview and balance, and the product will never correct you.

Start with a free site or a free database at marinahost.app. If any word in the product makes you stop and think, tell us at hello@marinahost.app. We would rather fix a word than defend it.