Providers: Whats your background?

[MannDude]

Lot of providers here, and curious to know your background. Why did you get in the hosting game? What were you doing before?

Think it would be interesting to learn more about everyone's skillsets and what brought them to starting or working for a hosting company.

 

[KuJoe]

I started hosting because I had been running a handful of websites for some odd years but since I didn't know anything about Linux, I could only do things with a GUI so I became a cPanel guru. After running cPanel for my own websites, I learned a lot about linux and was not only comfortable with the command line, I did a lot of scripting and automation for my cPanel servers. One day while looking for hosting options, a long-time member on WHT contacted me on another forum (AnandTech) and introduced me to the idea of running my own hosting company which I never thought of before. After we went back and forth via PMs, we took the conversation to the phone and chatted for a few hours about the basics and what I needed to know and do. Prior to my first attempt, my linux knowledge was decent enough that I could do basic troubleshooting and follow tutorials online easily. At the time I was working with my current company as a HP Non-Stop Operator with a strong background in Windows OSes (I know, great skillsets for a linux-based hosting company :lol.

Funny enough, prior to getting into web hosting I was the sole staff member for one of the largest dragon forums in the world. 

I had planned on typing up a lengthy post about my background and history because I like to think it's unique, but I'm sure we all have unique stories and nobody really reads posts that have more than 3 paragraphs these days. 

 

[kaniini]

My background is pretty lame.  My father ran a dialup ISP in the 1990s (first V.92 provider in Oklahoma!), so I pretty much carried on from that.

When I was 16 I was running a shell provider with another kid who had just turned 18, the only reason why I was around for that was because I knew more about sysadmin tasks than the rest of them did.  That wound up being bought out by another company called linuxsquare.net.  The result was SystemInPlace.net, which launched SIP:GRID in 2004, based on VMware ESX, which was one of the earliest virtualization products on the market.  This wound up being kind of a disaster because VMware ESX was at the time extremely buggy (time skew issues were a major problem, and a lot of our customers wanted to run IRCd which is sensitive to time skew).  Later, we launched RapidXen and related brands -- those, essentially the entire SIP virtualization product line, got bought by Enzu in June 2012.

After a few months of that, I wound up going my own way and launched a virtualization product out of my consulting business.

 

[Damian]

Started with shared hosting, did that for ~10 years, moved to VPS because burst.net sucked and we knew we could do better. Now we're moving on to other things.

 

[willie]

Started with shared hosting, did that for ~10 years, moved to VPS because burst.net sucked and we knew we could do better. Now we're moving on to other things.

Wait, what do you mean about moving on to other things?  Is something happening to ipxcore??? 

 

[HalfEatenPie]

Wait, what do you mean about moving on to other things?  Is something happening to ipxcore???

 

They're moving to self-beard trimmers and pictures of manly men eating breakfast food.  

Also don't forget the scotch.  

 

[peterw]

moving on to other things

Maybe another location?

 

[Awmusic12635]

Started with a simple shared account for my own sites then later a VPS then split the cost of a dedicated with a few friends.

Later started hosting sites for a few other friends then eventually thought I could charge for it and do it better than others.

 

[Francisco]

I originally got into hosting when I was 14 - 15 hosting off an old 586 I was able to dig up.

I did it mostly to help friends but I did have a few paid clients. They normally just sent me some gear to help upgrade the server (one client sent an 80GB harddrive which was a huge deal back then).

Shaw banned me from their services for a while because I was burning so much bandwidth (they claimed I was in the top 1% in bandwidth usage - woops <_<). I had to move everyone to a reseller account I picked up from 24hosting so they'd get off my back.

Once I was out of highschool I went to college to get a degree is programming. That went fine but I was taught MS languages (legacy ASP, MSSQL, VB6, etc). After I got screwed around for a few years by companies in Victoria not paying me I went out on my own. I landed quite a few contracts but I started to get nagged quite a bit by an old community of mine to start offering VPS servers as the current offers floating around were incredibly expensive.

I looked it over, crunched some numbers, and put $5000 from my life savings into buying 4 Q6600 nodes.

The rest was history from there.

Francisco

 

[blergh]

tl;dr

Started getting into it all when i was 16-17, didn't know i could be making some decent money off of it until years later. Jumped off the LEB-train a few years ago and are now doing mid-range stuff instead.

Might add that this is more or less on a consultancy basis.