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Why did you start your own hosting company, what motivated you and what makes you special? - Page 2
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Why did you start your own hosting company, what motivated you and what makes you special?

2

Comments

  • @Jack I like Australia :)

  • @Jack said: His an aussie I believe. :)

    Well, I'm Irish. But live in Melbourne, AUS.

    Which is apparrently, the worlds most livable city - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_most_livable_cities

  • @serverbear You are lucky, it's beautiful there. I live in Winston-Salem, the tobacco capital of the U.S., and one of the most boring cities in the world. It gives me plenty of time to work, as there is nothing else to do here.

  • @toratekdotnet said: there is nothing else to do here.

    You are kidding, right? I am just south of Charlotte, in SC, and the Carolinas has so much American history to tour and visit it would take a lifetime to take it all in. Many major battles of the American Revolution and Civil War were fought in this area.

  • @miTgiB I was talking strictly about Winston Salem. I am moving next year to Charlotte. The Carolinas are beautiful. By the way, I've been in Williamsburg, VA not to long ago here: http://www.colonialwilliamsburg.com/?WT.mc_id=1801

  • @Jack said: @serverbear do you still have an Irish accent or has it gone aussie now?

    Only moved here when I was 22 (7 years ago), there's some study that you'll never lose your accent if you move to another country past a certain age (I think it's 14). My wife's parents are from Ireland, they've lived in Melbourne for 50 years & still got thick accents.

  • @serverbear we pick up accents in our first couple of months, and then past like 14 we never loose them. But who cares? You're awesome, and like I've said, ServerBear.com is one of the best ideas I've seen in a very long time.

    By the way, some kind of objective metric for customer service would be awesome, just an idea.

  • @toratekdotnet sure, how about something that scrapes all web hosting forums and does a sentiment analysis on threads about particular hosts? ;)

  • @serverbear While I understand the sarcasm, I was being serious. You could end up being the Google of Web Hosting. So much data nicely organized in one place is an extremely useful tool. I can see the potential of it.

  • @toratekdotnet said: could end up being the Google of

    Words, which when spoken, are an immediate sign of failure to come.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran

    On topic...

    I had no idea the hosting industry was so large when I started, all I knew was that GoDaddy was running the show and I knew I could do better. I enjoy doing it. What makes me special? I'm not a logo, I'm a person, and my clients have a direct link to the person managing the server. That's true for a lot of hosts here, but it's still something I don't see enough of in the big picture. Too many vague hosts pretending to be something they aren't, overcompensating with fake professionalism, and too many freaking mascots.

  • @subigo nope, he will succeed, I would bet anything on it. I hope he will patent/protect his idea while he's ahead of the pack.

  • PhoenixVPSPhoenixVPS Member
    edited August 2012

    @jarland Thank you for your comment, I really appreciate it. We used to have a logo with wings, a mascot (a robot called Tek), and all that stupid stuff. The funny thing was that it all came from our computer hardware business, and since we had it, we used it for the hosting as well. One day when we decided to rebrand to VPS Node Box we stripped everything to a bare minimum and settled for a simple logo. A red box with an "L" on one side - that stands for Linux. I think it's an okay logo, and I hope it's representative of us.

    Thanked by 1jar
  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    I do it because I enjoy it (money is not a motivating factor for me which is why I don't collect a paycheck). I enjoy answering tickets, troubleshooting problems, writing code, building servers, interacting with clients, interacting with other companies, and at the end of the day I enjoy doing a search for my company and finding good reviews out there. My partner and I enjoy watching the company grow faster than we ever planned for so it's always exciting for us.

    Originally I came up with the idea because I saw a need for a service that wasn't available (off-site backups, at the time BQBackup was the only provider talked about on WHT). We built a custom platform but it just wasn't taking off like I had expected. During one of our meetings I made mention of LEB.com and we ran some numbers and my partners (at the time there were 3 of us) decided to try our hand in the LEB market and it just took off. We scrapped our off-site backup plans and replaced them with backup VPSs instead.

    What makes us special? Consistency - While we are not the fastest or cheapest provider out there we are very consistent. From uptime to performance to support our goal is to be consistent so you never have to guess what to expect from us.

    Oh, and we have a dragon... that's pretty special. :D

  • @KuJoe Thank you

  • @jarland , you are special in many ways :)

  • InfinityInfinity Member, Host Rep

    @toratekdotnet said: How can I request a username change?

    Drop me a PM.

  • AsadAsad Member
    edited August 2012

    @Infinity said: Drop me a PM.

    You wield that level of POWER? :O

    image

  • InfinityInfinity Member, Host Rep

    @AsadHaider said: You wield that level of POWER? :O

    Infinite possibilities.

  • Well, I know at BigScoots we like to think that we provide a service other hosts cannot. We are a smaller company but provide support at the level of the big managed providers out there (i.e. Knownhost, etc.). We've created a niche and we very happy with the unique offerings we have developed. Do it because you love it and have something unique to offer, NEVER for money, you will be sorry if you do ;)

  • TazTaz Member

    Another about us page. :(

  • Its really not, I'm responding to why we got into hosting. Its sure as heck not the money... lol What else could it be besides enjoying it? Its just the truth my man.

  • PhoenixVPSPhoenixVPS Member
    edited August 2012

    @BigScoots from one web design geek to another, your web site is really awesome, it looks nice and friendly, and if I wouldn't be in this business I would definitively sign up.

    If I may nitpick one thing: in your screen.css at line 370 add the following to:
    ul.menu li a {
    cursor: pointer;
    }

    Right nor when you hover over the top menus it's just a cursor and it looks weird to me (I am also a web designer so I am picky). That would take care of it. Otherwise it's plain awesome, great job.

    Thanked by 1BigScoots
  • Nitpicking is a way of life, one that I certainly subscribe to. Unfortunately my eyes bleeding due to the 9038490824 hours that I have put into the development of the site prevents me from doing any more at this time, but its on the list!

  • @BigScoots I know what you mean :D - by the way, have you plaid around with Cloud Linux by any chance?

  • @vpsnodebox We have, and we have installed it on a few of our dedicated customers machines. We haven't used it for ourselves as we've seen significant conflict with many of our clients setups. Generally its only real benefit in my eyes are the hard ceilings you can put in place for shared environments, but with a VERY limited abusive client base, we have self-built monitoring tools in place to prevent abusive behavior if any was to exist at all. I don't know to be honest, still on the fence. Just seems like a lot of trouble for very little gain in our situation -- I do however see it being very beneficial to those offering very low priced yearly shared hosting plans who are prone to abuse.

    The future of CL looks bright though, perhaps in a year or so their updates will force our switch.

  • @BigScoots we tried it as well and our experience has been similar. Back then it was, excuse my English, utter crap. Now they improved it allot and you can actually set resource limits per package type in cPanel, but it has still a long way to. The message that Cloud Linux promotes is stupid, dangerous and crazy. I would have this to say to Cloud Linux: You can't / shouldn't treat your customers like cattle.

    And then there is this craziness: http://www.cloudlinux.com/blog/clnews/hosting-thousands-of-customers-on-a-cpanel-server.php

    Most of those who think that hosting is a get rich quick scheme will byte.

    Could this be an alternative to CL?
    http://www.betterlinux.com

  • @vpsnodebox betterlinux is interesting, to be honest I've never heard of them. I'm not sure either of them are quite to the point where we need them. I have come to terms with the fact that one day without a doubt we will 100% need to make the switch because cpanel alone just wont cut it, just as fantastico and other addons became a standard, I am confident cloudlinux or a competitor will also some day. In the mean time, we are quite content with the status quo :)

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep
    edited August 2012

    That's hilarious. I had over 1500 cPanel clients on an Intel Atom 330 with 2GB of RAM, 2 500GB hard drives in software RAID1, and CentOS 5 without any issues. I was only using about 60GB of bandwidth a month but memory usage was always under 1GB and loads were always under 0.8 except for when backups ran. Optimization is key, not hardware.

    Wish I never sold it. :(

    /rant

  • @KuJoe I believe you. When we've designed our Hybrid Cloud Hosting (which is basically clustered shared hosting) we calculated that each customer would use the maximum amount of available resources. Each account type runs in a 15GB KVM VPS, and depending on the account type the numbers range from 75 customers per 15GB VPS to 18 customers per 15GB VPS. You will say that I'm insane, but it's so damn fast, our customers love. It's not cheap, but it's far superior to Hot Drupal's hosting and I would say cheaper: http://www.hotdrupal.com/drupal-hosting

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