As a quick preamble, I'll set the context of this post with a lyric that Randy Scruggs sang with Joan Osborne in their song, Passin' Thru: "It's a crazy world we live in, but the truth is, we're only passing through."
To me, that line speaks to how much there is going on all around us, and how little time we have to meaningfully participate. In a lot of ways, this sums up the modernizing world, with is widespread inter-connectivity and seemingly shrinking distances. Today, there are so many options, so much to do - and all of it right at our fingertips.
And though this comes with a long list of issues that it raises, what I love about the world today (focusing on the positive…) is that, with the widespread dissemination of information through the internet, the possibilities are limitless. You can learn to solder on YouTube, have a face-to-face chat over skype (provided you also have some webcams), or share your latest project with anyone in the world who stumbles upon in here on blogger.com.
SO.
I've been meaning to start this blog for a while now - but each time I would sit down to write, it just seemed like so much back-story that I was never sure where to start. And then, I'd usually just decide that perhaps another day, with more inspiration, I could sit down and really flush things out.
But who knows when I'm ever going to have time for that… so… I guess there's no time like the present to just jump in and start going. Forgive the quick (or, maybe not-so-quick) synopsis:
***
A few months ago I began toying (naively) with the idea of setting up some servers in my apartment. The impetus for this was that I wanted to put up a site for myself, and thought that it might just be a matter of getting hard drive space, making sure my computer was online 24/7 (which is was anyway) and then figuring out some HTML…
I began asking around and was pointed in the direction of a friend-of-a-friend, Keith Coleman, who I'd met a few times when he came here to NY to visit the friend in said friend-of-friend connection. Cutting to the chase (and I'm sure I'll fill in blanks and gaps as they become relevant to later thoughts) he was, indeed, running a server system - though his was geared primarily at high (read: impeccable) reliability servers for businesses. Unlike other shared-hosting sites that often boasted theoretically possible, but nominal-in-practice claims about unlimited bandwidth, 100% reliability, etc.… Keith was straight-up about what was and wasn't going to be happening with his server.
Now, this was fairly easy for him to do because he had set his system up so well that he could pretty much give anyone anything they wanted. But still - for many it was a breath of fresh air.
Businesses paid much higher monthly rates (upwards of $100, I think - vs. shared hosting that typically goes for somewhere between $5-$15/month depending on how long you sign a contract for) because they had specs on their service and reliability in the platform that they could count on for an honest 100% of the time. Not 95%, not 99.8%… but (well, I guess it would be infinitesimally close to) 100% (just a hair less since it's always possible that the Russians will finally come and destroy his whole set up, leaving his clients SOL).
But the thing is: for $5-$15/month, you don't get 5%-15% reliability. It's much higher than that. So for most consumer/small-business needs a shared hosting site will be just fine. Sure there will be a few outages here and there because the server hardware is being used to the hilt - sure you may get shut down if business is really booming and it's no longer worth it for bigger shared-hosting companies to allow you to use that much bandwidth - but really… for the substantial savings a few outages are okay… and if business is booming so much you get shut down - well, that's a problem I think most small businesses would love to have.
So Keith and I got to talking - and, in fact, another friend of Keith's, Nam Kim (who was on-board before me, actually), had a thought that, since a shared-hosting server was a coin's toss from the finish line with Keith's set-up, we might be able to use that infrastructure to build our own hosting site without having to sink too much more capital in. And while it might not make sense yet to use the really-premium quadruple-redundancy and instantaneous platform switching capability that Keith currently offers in his more expensive business plans, we could, through more judicious allocation of space within our shared server, offer a more dependable shared hosting service and tap into the "consumer" web-hosting market made up of everyone, their mother, their brother… oh, and their cousin.
Additionally - as a gimmick that we hope might be interesting for some of you, we're going to try to document every step that we take here on this blog. If you dig deep enough, you can probably find out most of the behind-the-scenes things with any company these days anyway. But who cares enough to do all that digging for every company that comes along? If you're curious about us at all, hey - we'll just lay it all out there. We don't purport to know all the answers, but we're taking our best, most educated guesses. We welcome any ideas, opinions, rants, raves, reviews, and more. And if you just want to hang on for the ride and experience an entrepreneurial experience vicariously through us - we are happy to have you in that capacity too. After all - we're the first to admit that it's a crazy world we live in… and we're only passing through.
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