Unlike most posts this one isn’t about technology or security. Just a little history.
Back in 1994 four Apple engineers (Kevin Brooks, Antonio Ordonez, Scott Winders and Dave Wells) decided it was time to build out our own part of The Internet. With Dave’s knowledge of the BBS world, especially the discount program available to “BBS customers”. We racked hundreds and hundreds of modems (and power bricks), I have a picture (somewhere). We figured out how to deploy shared hosting on an Apple AWS 95 running Apple’s Unix OS A/UX. That little server ran email, shared hosting, DNS, radius authentication and USENET news for our first customers. Eventually it became a news only server but severed us well for several years before being retired. The only web server code available at the time was the NSCA server code, but it lacked any multi tenancy capabilities. Kevin added a few bits of code and we were able to start selling shared hosting over a single ISDN line out of a small office in Santa Clara California.
We we selling shell accounts, an IRC hackers playground – sigh. We had to shut those down. Ironically, today you can spin up a “cloud shell” on Google or Amazon with the click on a button. We had the “NetGate Mall”, allowing early e-commerce services for our customers. We also shut that down as customers migrated to their own SSL certs and hosted (ShopSite) stores. That was until PCI compliance caused almost everyone to run to e-commerce providers (Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.). If only we hadn’t shut down the mall…
How times have changed. If only we had known what the future would bring.
All of our founders but one have moved on to other things. Instead of racks of modems and servers our infrastructure is now 100% hosted at Amazon. We haven’t sold dialup accounts in a very long time. Today we focus on providing best in class hosting services for DNS, mail and web (everything needed by every business).