In November 2014 we sold the first instance: one core, 1 GB of memory, 20 GB of spinning disk in Frankfurt, four euros a month on a six-month term. The customer is still with us and now runs eleven machines.
Ten years on there are 42 sites in 31 countries, 214 racks, nineteen people, and roughly 41,800 running instances. We have taken no outside investment, we have never run identity verification, and we have never sent a bandwidth overage invoice.
What we got wrong
- 01We kept card payments two years longer than we should have, and the compliance pressure that came with them shaped decisions we would rather it had not.
- 02We opened three sites in 2020 that could not be adequately staffed, and closed one of them in 2021.
- 03We were slow to publish incident write-ups until 2019. The ones we did not publish are the ones we learned least from.
What we are keeping
The rule from the first week: never ask a customer for a document we would not want to store ourselves. Everything else — the hardware, the regions, the panel, the price — has been rebuilt at least twice.