Problogue

Like a prologue, this is the first entry to my blog.

This blog is about what's happening within Network Guild. Through it, you will be able to see our day to day battles, what we do, and how we go about solving problems. Some of the other members of Network Guild may also have interesting stuff in their blogs should they decide to keep them up to date.

A little history about Network Guild (NG). Originally Devon McCullough and myself started managing a Sun Workstation which we kept at his ISP in Cincinatti Ohio. We retired the Sun in 1999 for a much faster 500mhz Pentium-3.

It was in 2001, just before my daughter was born that Devon was visiting me while we were living in London that we decided to combine our two consulting efforts and create a company, hence Network Guild was born.

Somewhere around 2001, we move the new box to Dayton under the excellent care of Jim Miller who at the time worked for IBS. Then, somewhere around 2003, IBS sold the colocation service to DoNet. By 2004, we were back with Jim Miller in his own colo, still in Dayton Ohio.

Devon and I initially used the box for our consulting projects. It eventually became apparent to us that consultants were always hungery so we decided to try to make a business out of web hosting.

We became an OpenSRS registrar, we built some scripts to manage Apache to do what is known in the field as "provisioning". Provisioning is what makes it easy for us to set up a new client in one place without having to mess with a dozen of different systems manually.

From then until now, we have tried to find our niche in the marketplace. Web-hosting has gone from being expensive to being free in some cases. It's really hard to make a business where you give your product away and try to make it up in volume.

What keeps Network Guild alive today is a small set of good clients who are willing to pay a small company for a personalized service which they cannot get elsewhere on the highly comoditized web hosting vendors.

So, this blog, you will hear what it takes from a technical and sometimes business point of view to run a small time web hosting company. I hope you enjoy reading and look forward to reading some comments.