Thread: How did you start in the industry?

Running your business from an office is fine (of course) but actually running hosting from it is not.

Colocation and renting servers would be more cost efficient, better reliability and much more.

Scrap that plan yes.

Weigh up the real cost of building infrastructure to come even close to competing with any commercial datacenter.

You also need a heck of a lot of space for it to be viable.

Of course having an office is fine, re-read what im saying... Don't expect to be able to viably run servers from an office and expect to provide a good service.

You either need to rent space in a datacentre, rent servers, or build a *proper* datacentre... There is no inbetween if you want to provide a realistic service level.

I started off as a reseller in 2002 and quickly 'graduated' to having my own leased servers with EV1 (then Rackshack) in Texas, the first being a Duron 1000 with 1GB of RAM. Primarily we hosted a popular online service (which was later sold to fund expansion), as well as customer websites.

Many leased servers later, in 2004 the business was large enough for me to give up my day job. Leased servers turned into co-location and full racks.

In 2006 Darren came onboard, bringing to the table his established Tsohost brand (which had already been a server customer for 3 years) and his knowledge, ideas, passion and enthusiasm. Since then we have built on the success of Tsohost and the mass-market appeal of its products to an extent that it now accounts for a large portion of the company's turnover.

In 2007 we moved most of our operation (staff, houses, office and most of our servers) to Bray on Thames in Berkshire. We're now just a mile from our primary datacentre presence, a private suite in Bluesquare 2.

In 2009 we find ourselves in a very strong position indeed. Business is growing by an extraordinary amount month-on-month. Client retention is near 100%, we have no ongoing service issues and our clustered hosting platform, developed entirely in house, is unrivalled in the UK market and making a big impact.

.....

Don't underestimate the importancy of having decent connectivity to your office. I wouldn't recommend hosting critical servers there but when you've got a few users competing for the same ADSL connection, using KVMs/DRAC/VNC/RDP as well as SSH, web browsing, large IMAP accounts, etc it can really hurt your productivity.

Originally Posted by adamsmith

I started off as a reseller in 2002 and quickly 'graduated' to having my own leased servers with EV1 (then Rackshack) in Texas, the first being a Duron 1000 with 1GB of RAM. Primarily we hosted a popular online service (which was later sold to fund expansion), as well as customer websites.

Many leased servers later, in 2004 the business was large enough for me to give up my day job. Leased servers turned into co-location and full racks.

In 2006 Darren came onboard, bringing to the table his established Tsohost brand (which had already been a server customer for 3 years) and his knowledge, ideas, passion and enthusiasm. Since then we have built on the success of Tsohost and the mass-market appeal of its products to an extent that it now accounts for a large portion of the company's turnover.

In 2007 we moved most of our operation (staff, houses, office and most of our servers) to Bray on Thames in Berkshire. We're now just a mile from our primary datacentre presence, a private suite in Bluesquare 2.

In 2009 we find ourselves in a very strong position indeed. Business is growing by an extraordinary amount month-on-month. Client retention is near 100%, we have no ongoing service issues and our clustered hosting platform, developed entirely in house, is unrivalled in the UK market and making a big impact.

.....

Don't underestimate the importancy of having decent connectivity to your office. I wouldn't recommend hosting critical servers there but when you've got a few users competing for the same ADSL connection, using KVMs/DRAC/VNC/RDP as well as SSH, web browsing, large IMAP accounts, etc it can really hurt your productivity.

Good story you have there, and very well done indeed!

Originally Posted by mike-dx

Year 1
test the hell out of them for the first 6-8 months to gain some basic knowledge, my main concern in this time will be uptime and reliability of the boxes, so hopefully by the end of the 1st year i'll have found enough information to keep the boxes up, running and reliable.

Hell of a waste of money in the first year to keep two servers running for you to "learn" how to keep them up and manage them - and you are never going to have real world experience with no customers on them, for e.g. you are never likely to have a dodgy php-bb hack, or a DOS attack if they aren't doing anything.

Year 2

I guess i'll be looking at splitting the two boxes or maybe taking on another one or two so i have some sort of cluster service to add to reliability.

Whats the point, you aren't using the two you've been paying for for a year..

If all goes well i'll transfer my customer base over to the dedicated servers.

About 22 months too late IMO.

learning more about server management and features.

You've already been doing this for almost two years - what you haven't usefully learned in these two years of p***ing away money, you aren't going to learn now.

Year 3

I'll be looking for an office, something that has a fiber connection so that i can buy one or two servers that i can set up onsite and manage.

Daft, illogical and pointless, IMO. Just because it has fibre doesn't mean you don't pay a connection fee, and its going to be single provider and none resilient, so you don't want to host off of it. It might be OK for a company connection serving browsing and email, but not for hosting from.

Again i'll keep the rented servers so my customers are not affected by any
any testing etc.

??? - You've just said above you are going to build a mini office / DC and having paid for a leased line, and some routing equipment, presumably some UPS's, air-con, generator etc., you now have around 6 rented servers and an empty mini DC - Madness!!!
Year 4

Get a rack system up and running on site with maybe 4 or 5 servers

Eh, you've got a stack of rented servers and now you are going to compete with a home-brew office server room against a commercial DC basing your sales model on reliability and uptime.

There are certain things that i have chosen to omit from this plan,

Logic? Sense? Sustainable Business Model?

Not sure where you are going with this, but IMO I suggest you throw this fag packet away and start again..

/close my 2p.

Originally Posted by Owenx

2002ish with a small company which i left for personal reasons which has now become huge.

Go on..

Originally Posted by Owenx

2002ish with a small company which i left for personal reasons which has now become huge.

Yes, please tell us who is this company?

Hovis..

Unless it's a mistake his age here is 20 which would mean 2002 he was 13 or 14.

So I'd take that with a pinch of salt.

20 going on 35 maybe?