How we created hosting

I have long wanted to share our experience in creating a hosting company. And this day has come. The history of the main hosting project "N", which was created in 2011, when it was 18 years old. Prior to this, there was experience with other hosting companies as a system administrator. With your partner, they came up with the names, twisted for a long time and came together on the name “N”, deciphered this Networking Engine (Network Engine). The names approved, then bought two servers FUJITSU, two unit, placed in DC, only in Dnepropetrovsk was then, and only built. Thought out the design of the site, a friend drew.





Let's go, everyone at that time chose ISPSystems products, and it was interesting for me to try cPanel + CloudLinux, and the VCS server is SolusVM. Everything is fine, only the money quickly ran out to contain it all, including colocation ... The starting capital was about $ 3000. The business was developed through the usual advertising on the forums, and he kept something like on the websites of friends, local companies, with whom they personally could agree. Although this is the most stable customers and there is still, but virtually no profits from them.
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The money ran out, but all the same it was necessary to live for something, the project went to 3 plans, as a result, there are customers, they transferred them to ovh and so the project was a few years, they supported everything to work. Gradually I began to translate the project into English, I decided that I needed to go to that market, it was more interesting. That, in principle, justified itself. As a result, at the moment customers 50/50. And in 2014, we decided to resume the project, we decided to redesign the site. We have done and strategically divided the projects into 3 parts, for each market. For Ukraine, we registered TM and bought a domain in .ua, for Russia, respectively .ru. For the world left a purely English. Com. And separate sites, respectively, that each site has its own SEO strategy, for its markets. Justified it or not, still not sure. Everyone has their own opinion, but it seems to me that they did not lose, the traffic goes from 3 points.



Shared hosting is good, but they wanted to have their own server fleet, and again, there is not much money. And Dedik would like to sell their own and decided that first we will try to sell low cost dedicated servers, respectively, we bought motherboards with Celeron J1800 / J1900 on board, 8 GB RAM each. They piled it up into small cases, and the power supply unit was self-assembled, it was probably collected in the garage, and often burned, re-soldered :) It was fun to live, customers quickly took apart. The main problem, of course, was that they were black customers. Many disputes on PayPal were received, the anti-feed system had to be modified and checked by customers. Not much later, it was decided that it takes 6U, and so-so solutions. They started to transfer all this to the Supermicro corps of the old ones, where the BP was normal. And gradually, they already bought HP servers and completely abandoned OVH. Also, over time, they completely abandoned the self-assembly servers, dismantling and selling the already normal E3, E5 servers. All about everything, it took 7 years. To date, launched another project "H", more ambitious, but more on that later. We also plan to launch two more new projects.

Now we look like this:







Of course, a lot of time, during this time it was possible to become a giant. The question is, only at what price - and with what investments.

Thank you for attention!