Four-Eight-Four [dot org]

The beginning of June marks yet another important moment for my fledgling business … it will be the first month that I’ve hosted all of my client sites (as well as internal stuff) on my own equipment.

My first hosting setup was a virtual server with Linode. I can’t say enough good things about Linode … they provided me a true Linux VPS, let me install the distro of my choice on it, and provided nearly flawless service (outside of some hardware hiccups) for the duration of the time I was a customer … about a year and a half.

Unfortunately, by the end of the summer last year, it was becoming clear that the breadth of services I was offering my clients was too much for a single VPS to handle, so I started leasing a dedicated server, and set up a few virtual servers on it. Among other things, this allowed me to have VPS machines for both PHP4 and PHP5 sites, and I was (finally!) able to start developing in PHP5.

However, last month I became dissatisfied with the company that I had been leasing the server from, and as a result I began looking into other options, and for the first time seriously began to consider colocating my own machine.

I ended up ordering a dual-proc dual-core AMD Opeteron machine with 4 gigs of RAM from Dell, and I’ve got it colocated in downtown Chattanooga. At this point, I’m anticipating adding a second low-end rackmount machine to my setup in the next few months, mainly for the purpose of storing backups on a different machine … and I’m now going to be able to do my own off-site backups pretty easily. Today I signed up for a safe deposit box at a bank downtown, and once I get all the hardware I’ve ordered for the backup setup, I’ll begin taking full backups of the machines to the vault every two weeks.

As if this wasn’t exciting enough, in about a month, my brother is slated to become the first official employee of my company. He’s coming to town next week to find himself an apartment or house, and will be moving here around the first of July.

Things are starting to look really good. The first year and a half of this endeavor was hard, and the last six months or so have been … well, better … but now I’m starting to see that the momentum I thought I saw building around the end of last year has been sustained, and my growth has been consistent … and honestly, a little better than I had expected it to be by this time this year.

Now … maybe in a few months I can start looking for an actual office!