MicroNodes Server Hosting

In Highschool my friend David and I loved hosting game servers for our friends to play on. We used rented vps' from many different companies and we eventually got the idea to try to start our own server hosting & vps company. We came up with the name MicroNodes and using some birthday and work money we managed to rent a dedicated server, get a WHCMS and Virtualizor license, and hired someone to make us a simple website.

Our original website

Once we got our basic infrastructure, payments, auto provision and everything else setup we started to advertise on Low End Box and Web Hosting Talk forums. The first few days were slow, but we eventually got a few vps sales! At the same time, we setup WHM and CPanel and started to offer managed web hosting. After the first few weeks and a dozen sales we got a scary looking email and realized the huge problem with running a hosting company: Abuse.

An abuse report we recieved

We quickly realized that many bad actors look for small, startup hosting companies like mine and use our services to run malicious scripts, email spam campaigns and more. We quickly terminated a user email spamming and another running ssh brute force attacks and came up with plans to detect bad actors. We blocked ports, used a service to check for spam and abuse reports and continued on.

Me cable managing a new server I installed (messy cables are a colocation customer's)

We started out using a rented dedicated server from another hosting company, but with the cashflow that we now had we were able to expand. We started by renting a small rack at the Digital Fortress datacenter in Seattle. We eventually moved to Wowrack in Seattle and upgraded to a 1/4th cab. We bought hardware online and had the datacenter rack & stack our hardware for us. We eventually grew to the point where we could expand to a new location in Fremont. We rented a full cab at Hurricane Electric's Fremont 2 datacenter and ordered lots of older hardware off of ebay and other sites. I loaded my truck and made the drive down 680 to fremont and with the help of my friend David, we racked all of our hardware and configured our switch.

Some of the hardware we installed

As time went on, we wanted to start actually making money. We had very small profit margins to compete with the giants and the little money we did make was mostly reinvested back into the company. In 2019 we decided it would be best to close down MicroNodes. The competition could offer the same thing for almost half the price as us and business was slowing down. When the company closed down we were sad but still proud of what we accomplished as highschool students.

I learned alot about the cloud, networking, and systems administration and loved (almost) every minute working in the Datacenter.