Lets see:
Was introduced and into computers at a young age, built a computer together with my father sometime before kindergarten (I don't remember the exact age) and enjoyed the experience.
I started my first website in middle school at the time made using freewebs.com (which became webs.com later). It was a game related website for a online game that I enjoyed playing and it grew to becoming pretty popular over time. Once I outgrew the game I became interested in a lot of technology in general and wanted to do more than just a site builder could provide. I signed up for bluehost account for a year, which I ended up moving past pretty fast (didn't last a year). I started a tech blog with a friend of mine. We got pretty good at it, 12+ well written articles a day about either tech news or very well written and graphic guides for various apple devices. Bluehost, as you know, has no problem throttling your server for excessive CPU usage when your site grows in traffic. It got to a point where my account was being throttled 75% of the day and I grew tired of it. I picked up my very first VPS with volume drive, their 4GB RAM OVZ plan. I didn't know much about linux at the time so it took a bit of learning as I went but all went pretty good for a few months. I split the cost with 2 friends of mine (from online) since at the time I did not have a consistent source of income. After about 6 months problems started appearing with the VPS. Lots of either being overloaded where I would have to emergency email them to fix their shit because the node was overloaded. Because of these problems our server was barely usable. I convinced the two friends that were sharing the cost to contribute a bit more (I covered most of it) to upgrade to one of VD's dedicated servers because then the node couldn't be overloaded because we controlled it. This worked great for a long time but the costs started to add up. Since we had cPanel on one of VD's E3 deals the cost wasn't crazy high but for my level of income it took a decent amount of my money to have this server. I tried to find ways to offload this cost somewhere and it came into my mind that I could sell extra space on this server that we were not using. I sold a few basic "unlimited" shared hosting plans, then later changed to fixed limits because I realized this is one of the reasons I had hated Bluehost. I begin to think that I might be able to make some extra income from doing this and have fun doing it to. I first started doing it with friends I knew so that if I messed up they would understand and I would learn from it.
Fastforward to June of 2011 and I had decided that I knew enough to start a basic shard hosting business. I racked my brain for ideas for a name but it took a while. Then when riding my bike around the neighborhood I thought of the name that would become Fliphost. On June 27th 2011 Fliphost.net was born.
First version of the Fliphost website (I still cry from how bad it is):
Note: That is not me in the to right corner, that is someone I gave free hosting to in return for frequent exposure on his youtube channel, which worked out pretty well.
Linux continued to intrigue me for a while. I had planned to use the income that I got from Fliphost to explore other technology that I could otherwise not afford. I would frequently browse online and at some point a person introduced me to webhostingtalk which really began to spike my interest more in web hosting. Virtualization began to peak my interest. I knew this would be much more difficult than what I was currently doing and did not want to mess it up. I did research on it for a month or two and decided I didn't know enough to start but I still wanted to eventually get there. I began to resell burstnet VPS, to gain more experience and because this provided more income than shared hosting which would allow me to afford my own node in the future when it became better money wise to host directly on my own node than resell theirs. One day after deciding I was reselling enough (around 40-60) at the time I decided it was time for my own node. I signed up with ioflood in AZ for one node due to his previous help and suggestions on WHT. I manually migrated all customers off of the resold burstnet servers to my new node to reclaim all the profit, I would later learn the lesson of not overcommiting your resources / capital. I twice bought an additional node when I thought I was going to need it but canceled after a month when it did not become needed. I did later expand to a 2nd node with ioflood. (My first LET offer is with ioflood if you look through my post history there). I had a wonderful time at ioflood and Gabe probably offered the best and most personalized support I ever had there. Sadly the pricing became not right for what I wanted to do and then later moved to ace-host in Michigan with one of their large E5 nodes which I sold off of for a while ( pretty sure I have LET offer from there too).
At this place I started to offer MC hosting as a hobby really, I was interested in the game and a few people I knew were so I had space and got a multicraft license. I later on moved from ace-host to Incero and split the large E5 up into smaller E3 servers which performed much better, and gave MC its own server which had been giving my E5 IO problems before. At this point in time almost by accident my MC business jumped up in popularity pretty fast. I saw a tweet on twitter about a person looking for a possible affiliate deals related to their MC website. I thought what the heck, nothing to lose. I contacted them and turns out they were the person that owned minecraftservers.com , I near perfect SEO website for the hosting and a very well made website. We struck a affiliate deal, that all things related to hosting would have order links to my servers. I was selling MC hosting @ $16 per GB at a time when everyone else was racing to the bottom and didn't have to change any prices because of this deal. At peak I hosted around 200 of servers @ $16 per GB with no advertising effort required by me, solely because of the deal. At some point the site owner decided to break it off so we did (gave me an excuse to stop offering it) I had begun to notice I hated MC support, 13 year olds with parent credit cards who know nothing about using their server.
I then had a period of adding a bunch of new things. Started offering SSD hosting, high storage servers in 2012 because I saw a need , backups and a bunch of new stuff because I believed more in making something I could be proud of than making a large profit from it (So I reinvested most of what I made). Fastforward I did a lot of research of KVM again because that also interested me and now I offer that in LA.
Here where just a few months ago, the business I started as a way to have fun and learn from the process, Fliphost was acquired / merged with Query Foundry LLC (owns Cloud Shards). Now we offer dedicated servers, colo, have fully owned hardware + network and have nowhere to go but up. I am really excited for what we have in store.
I don't normally rant on like this and I am pretty sure I have not written this much about my story in one place before. I guess that is because I am proud of what I have done and the great time I have had doing it. I just completed my first semester in college going for an IT major and without starting web hosting I am not sure I would be as confident about what I want to do for future as I am now.
Also if you are curious I have put the below a timeline of the various Fliphost websites:
1st:
HERE
2nd:
HERE
3rd:
HERE
And of course the best and newest for last
4th:
HERE
TL
R:
I wanted learn more about tech and I believed I could do it better than the crap hosting from bluehost + volumedrive I was getting
