A small team. A clear philosophy. Skin in the game.
We are not a cloud platform with thousands of customers and a support ticket queue. We are a small, focused team that builds and runs infrastructure for organizations that cannot afford to compromise.
Who we are
PILOT operates from Zagreb, Croatia and Vienna, Austria. We are backed by a network of technology partners and institutions across the region — but the team managing your infrastructure is small enough that you'll know who's responsible for it.
We don't use our real names in client-facing work. We use call signs — the way real pilots do. It is not a gimmick. It reflects how we think about operational security and professional identity.
What we believe
Infrastructure should be owned, not rented. Cloud platforms are excellent for elastic workloads. For everything else, ownership gives you control, predictability, and independence that no SaaS agreement can replicate.
Open source is the only honest foundation. Proprietary infrastructure creates dependency. Open source means your configuration, your data, and your options belong to you — not to a vendor whose priorities may change.
Boutique is not a euphemism for small. It means deliberate. We take on a limited number of clients because we intend to be genuinely responsible for what we run. Not a ticket number in a queue.
Sovereignty is not a feature. It is a baseline. Data that lives in EU jurisdiction, on EU-owned infrastructure, managed by EU-based people, under EU law — that is the minimum standard, not a premium option.
The PILOT brand universe
PILOT — the infrastructure provider. We fly it so you don't have to.
COPILOT — our support and ticketing system. Your direct line to the team managing your infrastructure.
HANGAR — our datacenters in Zagreb and Vienna. Where your infrastructure lives.
TOWER — infrastructure and endpoint monitoring. Nothing leaves our radar.
tresor.email — sovereign mail for individuals and small teams.
hangar.pm — Mac mini and Mac Studio colocation. Send your hardware, we rack it.
What we run on
Every service we offer runs on the same stack we'd run for ourselves. The full stack is public — no mystery ingredients.
We run Proxmox, not VMware. iRedMail, not Exchange. Nextcloud, not SharePoint. Gitea, not GitHub Enterprise. Open source throughout, because vendor lock-in is someone else's business model, not ours.
Backed by
PILOT is supported by a network of technology partners and regional institutions. We don't list them here by name — not because we're hiding anything, but because the relationship with your infrastructure provider should be about accountability and results, not logos on a page.
If you're doing due diligence and need to understand the backing structure, reach out.
How we work with clients
We don't do self-service signups. Every client engagement starts with a conversation about requirements, constraints, and what actually makes sense to deploy.
Some workloads belong on public cloud. Some belong with us. We'll tell you which is which, even if the answer means you don't become a client.
If that sounds like the kind of relationship you want with an infrastructure provider — let's talk.