Seahawk Bets on Astro and EmDash With Four New Brands

Seahawk Global is introducing four brands built on Astro and EmDash, across all three of its business units: Em Region and Seapanel for web hosts and agencies, Astro Nursery for the community, and Em Workers for businesses. Em Region, Astro Nursery and Em Workers are live, and Seapanel is coming soon.

It’s the biggest bet Seahawk has made outside WordPress since the company began. Here is why we’re making it, and why it doesn’t change how we feel about WordPress.

Why Astro

Astro builds websites that load fast because they ship almost no JavaScript. Pages are built ahead of time into plain HTML and served from the edge, so there is little to patch and little to break. For a site that mostly publishes, that’s most of what you want.

Developers have noticed. Astro passed 55,000 stars on GitHub in 2025, and its weekly npm downloads grew from about 360,000 at the start of that year to more than 900,000 by the end of it, by Astro’s own count. In 2026 the curve kept climbing, into the millions of downloads a week.

Cloudflare is behind it

In January 2026, Cloudflare acquired the team behind Astro. Astro stays open source and MIT-licensed, and now has one of the largest networks on the internet investing in it.

Then, in April, Cloudflare introduced EmDash: a full-stack TypeScript CMS built on Astro, which Cloudflare calls the spiritual successor to WordPress. EmDash runs serverless on Cloudflare Workers and gives site owners the admin they expect, posts, pages, media and plugins, with each plugin running in its own sandbox. It passed 12,000 stars on GitHub in its first six months.

Astro answered how fast a site can be. EmDash answers who edits it. Together they make a stack a business can actually run, and that’s the moment we’ve been waiting for.

Four brands, across all three units

Em Region (Seahawk Infra) is one panel for a host to see and modernize its fleet. A host uploads the domains it hosts and sees what each one runs. Customers who opt in get their homepage rebuilt in Astro and EmDash, for free, and the host runs the sites that move from Em Region. The customer stays with the host.

Seapanel (Seahawk Infra, coming soon) is the hosting panel and billing for EmDash and Astro sites. A host provisions, bills and manages modern sites on its own Cloudflare account, under its own brand, and gives customers an AI site builder with EmDash Build. Em Region shows a host which sites to move; Seapanel is where the host runs them.

Astro Nursery (Seahawk Media) is free, beginner-friendly guides and tutorials for building your first site with Astro. WordPress grew because anyone could learn it. Astro deserves the same welcome.

Em Workers (Seahawk Direct) builds fast, secure business websites on EmDash and Astro, run on Cloudflare’s edge: new builds, WordPress migrations and ongoing care, at revolutionary pricing.

We still love WordPress

Seahawk grew up on WordPress. We found it in our first year, in 2015, built a company on keeping WordPress sites healthy, and maintain thousands of them today. We’ve spent years at WordCamps and in the open-source community that made all of it possible. None of that changes.

WordPress has staying power. It still runs more of the web than anything else, and for sites that change every day, stores, memberships, publishers and teams who build visually, it remains the best tool there is. WP Maintain, WP Services, Pro Services and Seahawk VIP keep doing that work every day.

But not every site needs a server, a database and weekly plugin updates. Informational sites, the ones that mostly publish and rarely change, are a huge share of the web, and we believe Astro and EmDash will win a large share of them. We believe the same about developers, who are already choosing Astro for the sites they build for themselves.

That’s the bet: WordPress where it’s the right tool, Astro and EmDash where speed and simplicity win, and one partner whichever way a site goes. Our roots in WordPress open source are why we can make it. We learned what an open-source community can build, and we see that energy around Astro now.

“WordPress gave Seahawk everything, and we’ll keep giving back to it,” said Ryan James, CEO of Seahawk Global. “But we’re watching a new generation of the open web take shape around Astro and EmDash, with Cloudflare behind it, and we want to help build it rather than watch it. Em Region, Seapanel, Astro Nursery and Em Workers are how we do that for hosts, for the community and for businesses.”

Read more about how we build across the open-source web, or start an Astro project.