The story of the creator hosting-days

In the near 2005 I just started to study * nix operating systems, my friend owned a small local network and asked to help him with setting up the billing server, this was my first acquaintance with FreeBSD. I mastered it without any problems and got to work to a large city Internet provider, where I worked until 2006. Then there was a graduation from the university and many other important matters, but it so happened that in even less distant 2007 I was already working with all my might for 2 major American hosters. My duties were to solve the technical problems of the clients of these hosting providers, I really liked the work, and I saw how these two companies are growing and earning a lot of money.


Naturally, I literally set about trying to create my own hosting service, not just “create” it’s not clear how, but creating it using commercial billing and a control panel, renting servers in the American DC and with the right approach to business. There should follow "but there was one thing," but there is nothing like that. I and two of my friends actually rented our first server in Scranton and bought all the necessary software without problems.

Then I changed my job, there was a certain “upgrade” and I became the team leader of technical staff in one small company: much more fakapov, but a little more free time, which allowed me to work more closely with my own, or even more precisely, “our” hosting. People didn’t have any problems with paying for our hosting and as it turned out, quite a few people needed this hosting. Exactly, not “stable”, not “cheap” and not “the best in the world”, but one that would simply work normally and they would receive answers to their already few questions. There were no special problems with this and after 3 months we already had about 15-30 clients - friends, friends of friends, people whom we “recommended” and so on.
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It is a shame to say, but then we still had no imputed website, and I must say we were so lucky that all three culprits of the venture were each in their own way: I had and have a good reputation on the notorious WHT forum, and I know how to “agree” with DC, and with clients, I have a good technical base and I am familiar with the basics of billing, the second man is a good designer and programmer and already had a good experience with billing systems (and it’s worth noting that he had “cut off” a very good domain for our entire project) and the third is a connoisseur h tml + css and a good customer support.

We made the site in a fairly short time and, since we were interested in “foreign” customers, we bought a normal account from the payment gateway (payment acceptance system), and what is called “launched” hosting - all kinds of advertising on forums, coupons for Google-advanced and others advertising methods.

Immediately it is worth making a reservation what was and will be our hosting - all three together and unanimously decided that the hosting will be whiter than snow - no adult, spam, phishing and other materials, we do not “quickly respond to complaints” we try very hard not to let them “We slowly harness, but we are going fast,” something like that.

Again, it’s worth writing “but we didn’t take into account / but there was one fact / but we started quarreling”, but nothing happened, moreover, we even became more tolerant to each other, if earlier we could argue about the design of the small button for three hours website, now tolly buttons have become better to do, felters pay less attention to details, but in general the process goes faster.

I could continue this story ad infinitum but just to say that at this stage we overcame that “initial” frontier of which we were a little afraid at the very beginning, almost all our difficulties are predictable and quickly solved and, most importantly, our customers sometimes just write tickets that we are a good company, and this is really the best praise.

So - wish us good luck!