Who was your first provider?

Mason

Always interested to hear what people's first ever provider for web hosting and/or server hosting was.

Is your first hosting hosting provider still around? Do you still have services with them?

I didn't get into the hosting scene until 2014 (late bloomer compared to most of y'all). Went with Bluehost at the time and got a small VPS w/ cPanel. After a year or so, I started looking for alternatives and realized how much I was overpaying compared to the other big players and low end companies. Migrated everything over to ZappieHost, who was my first low end host, when they had their Canada location (OVH).

What's your story?

Mr_Tom

First provider for web hosting was Servage.net

First VPS was with Bytemark UK.

First dedi was @Clouvider if I remember correctly after discovering LET (still got it too).

valkyrie

DigitalOcean in late 2013 iirc, was first provider and the first vps was from them too, dedi was a Kimsufi KS-1 but its gone

ehab

DigitalOcean

dosai

Ramnode 128MB OVZ. I was using it as a vpn to bypass my college's wifi.

daffy

Linode

hanoi

bravenet - vpsforex - SliceHost

Matt247

VPS: Shinjiru
Webhosting: ServerFreak

tetech

Debbie Mc.... oh wait, provider.

debaser

My very very very first provider was ASHosting, one of the few affordable Dutch shared webhosting providers back in ~1997-98. They used Cobalt Raq of course.

The brand still exists, but I think they were sold a few times.

As for dedi/VM see here

@debaser said:
Thought this would be a fun topic for here. Shamelessly stolen from OGF.

My first dedi was in 2003-4 I guess, didn’t keep it for a long time as I only used for mail and a text only Usenet server. Bit of expensive for that. Don’t know what the provider was called. I still know the AS umber though: AS8587.

I cancelled it when I could get a colocated server for almost nothing at the ISP I worked for at the time.

My first VPS was a RootDS Mild at Webperoni, a German provider that was later bought by Server4you. I think it came with 20GB storage and 750GB traffic. We’re talking 2006 here.

Got another dedi after that, at @Hetzner_OL, some Opteron server in 2008. After that, some Kimsufi thingies.

My first vm in the Low End realm was from @liteserver in 2011 2014 and it has only gone downhill from there.

Chievo

Fastcomet . i was clueless and blind pricing is extremely balooned even not litespeed

Chriswayne

Maybe vultr?

DP

First dedi would be at NetSonic in ‘05 and first VPS would be at Spry Hosting/VPSLink in ‘07.

lentro

I started off with playing with drag-and-drop web builders, then built web apps deployed on managed services (like Heroku). Only recently have I worked on the OS level as well.

Web:
Weebly/Wix (2015)

VPS:
Azure (2018)

Dedi:
Kimsufi (2019)

yoursunny

My first website is on a desktop computer at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, circa 2006-2008.
I was in charge of developing the student housing department website.
I'm paid enough for my own meals as well as sometimes taking pretty girls to school cafeteria for dinners, and I'm allowed to host my own website on the same server.

The server has 512MB RAM and 100Mbps port, and runs Windows Server 2003.
Websites are on IIS 6.0, and different websites may use ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, or Java Servlet via Tomcat.
Databases include Microsoft Access, SQL Server Express, and MySQL.
There's also a separate VLC server for streaming media over UDP multicast, but it only works within the university campus.
File transfer is through FTP, with one FTP account per website.
There's no control panel, and everything is configured via remote desktop.

The server is placed in a room with 24x7 air conditioning, next to some audio equipment of an auditorium.
In exchange of colocation, the manager of the auditorium would login to the guest account and play minesweeper.
However, I didn't know that exchange, so I disabled the guest account during a re-installation.

A week later, I found the websites offline.
It turned out that, the manager found that he couldn't login to the computer anymore, so he brought in his own computer and placed it next to ours.
His computer touched the ESC key on the server, so that the server stuck on the boot menu when I rebooted Windows.
I resolved this problem by unplugging the keyboard.

I'm pretty sure the computer is dead by now, as it's been 15 years.

So who's my first provider?

• Myself, since I'm creating the IIS sites and FTP accounts?
• The student housing department, who owns the server and allows me to use it?
• The auditorium manager, who allows us to colocate the server in his equipment room?
• The student services division, who oversees both the student housing department and the auditorium?

skorous

@Mason said: Always interested to hear what people's first ever provider for web hosting and/or server hosting was.

Depends on your interpretation. I was working for a local university department back in '96 and one of our projects was to set up our own web service, email, etc... on the then relatively new Linux. Think it was Slackware like version 2 or something. So in a sense I was my own first provider.

kuroneko23

VPS : Vultr
WebHost : @SmallWeb

Andrei

My first dedicated server, and also first provider, was XLHost, back in 2006, when their website and offers looked like this: http://web.archive.org/web/20060525182633/http://xlhost.com:80/

I see they're still in business, however I haven't used them for quite a lot of years.

Seems so unreal thinking that you now pay $10 for a vps with similar features as a $300 server back then... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

havoc

Either GCP or Alpha not sure

aveline

Burstnet but they are out of business :-)

Mason

@debaser said: As for dedi/VM see here

Whoops. You created the same topic AND I even responded to it a few months back. My memory is failing me

@Mr_Tom said: First dedi was @Clouvider if I remember correctly after discovering LET (still got it too).

Howdy, neighbor! My personal "flagship" dedi is with Clouvider NYC, premium stuff

I think my first dedi was with DatabaseByDesign in Philly. Had three with them total, down to one right now.

@yoursunny said: His computer touched the ESC key on the server, so that the server stuck on the boot menu when I rebooted Windows.

That bastard, I hope he has minesweeper nightmares now!

@havoc said: Alpha

Alpha.... racks? or VPS? Either yikes or nice on that one.

havoc

@Mason said: Alpha.... racks? or VPS? Either yikes or nice on that one.

VPS the dude in Bulgeria. Was pretty legit even back then. 1 EUR a month if memory serves so would be competitive even now

Mason

@havoc said:

@Mason said: Alpha.... racks? or VPS? Either yikes or nice on that one.

VPS the dude in Bulgeria. Was pretty legit even back then. 1 EUR a month if memory serves so would be competitive even now

Aye, Alex is a good dude. Have had services with them for about 4 years now.

AaronSS

I honestly have no idea....???

seriesn

Good ol BurstNet.

Lee

Not sure who my 1st ever provider was, but my 1st dedicated server was from Rackshack.net in late 2001. A Cobalt RaQ 4i

angstrom

My first provider was Hostigation, which was later acquired by (and absorbed by) anyNode

Mew

I just googled for the cheapest provider and went with the most decent looking one on the first page.

rcy026

I ran a ISP in the 1990's, before it was cool, so back then I was the host.
My first externally hosted VPS must have been with JohnCompanies or RootBSD, since they were basically the only ones supporting BSD in the early 2000's. But it was expensive and a pita to manage, so I pretty soon moved everything to dedicated hardware at Layered Tech (later called Datapipe, today known as Rackspace) and ran my own hardware for about 10 years.
I drifted away from the provider part of the business when I went into consulting and instead slowly descended into the lowend customer swamp, and here I am today, idling away with my $7 KVM's.

Ympker

I think it may have very well been Strato. When I was 8 and wanted to host my own gameserver my dad ordered a VPS for me from Strato. He was happy that I wanted to learn about computers (he worked as a sysadmin) and helped me out a bit.

debaser

@Ympker said:
Strato.

I can not hear that name without thinking of their horrible tv commercials.

When I was 8

Nice age to start. When I was 8 the WWW was released .

corbpie

Vultr

vyas

A gentleman

An idler never tells

gemuruhco

on 2011 .
First VPS 256MB Windows 2003 Standard from EXABYTES is my first vps a very long long long time ago .

sgheghele

If I remember correctly, first hosting provider was Siteground and first VPS was from Prometeus. Both still alive.

HostSlick

1. NozHost - is now vmbox.co

then

2. HostRail - dead
3. WhitelabelHost - dead
4. Voxility (back 2010 when it was called LimeHost.ro)

elliotc

Amazon, than digital ocean. I searched seedbox, someone on reddit told me the green forum.

Ympker

@debaser said:

@Ympker said:
Strato.

I can not hear that name without thinking of their horrible tv commercials.

When I was 8

Nice age to start. When I was 8 the WWW was released .

Those were the worst lol... Damn..

Ouch

rhinoduck

@debaser said: I can not hear that name without thinking of their horrible tv commercials.

Ah, Scooter, lol. I didn't even know they did anything like that. Anyway, let me continue a bit off topic to make a little more fun of them.

hey

VPS : slicehost

my first dedicated server from UK2

kassle

hobohost, one dollar shared hosting with cpanel ... support is excellent and still kicking alive.

openvirtual, my first vps and also my first entry to lowendworld. support is great, it's sad they're deadpooled.

dacentec, my first dedicated server experience. support is very good, but too many network maintenance.

cybertech

@yoursunny said:
sometimes taking pretty girls to school cafeteria for dinners,

proof or it didn't happen

yoursunny

@Mason said:

@yoursunny said: His computer touched the ESC key on the server, so that the server stuck on the boot menu when I rebooted Windows.

That bastard, I hope he has minesweeper nightmares now!

He wouldn't.
The auditorium manager works with microphones and projectors.
He doesn't know much about websites.

He had a student to make a website for the auditorium, hosted on the same server.
The main purpose of that site is to publish a PDF form for auditorium rentals, which should be downloaded, filled, and faxed in.

I found the website crashing all the time.
It's an ASP.Net site and there's no source code, so I can't fix it.
After talking to the higher ups, I extracted the PDF forms out of the database and posted in a corner of our website, and turned off his website.
There were no fuss about this one, because the moneymaker is the PDF: auditorium rental to entities outside the university is billable by the hour.

---

@cybertech said:

@yoursunny said:
sometimes taking pretty girls to school cafeteria for dinners,

proof or it didn't happen

Sure, here are two Blogger entries where I mentioned taking someone to dinner.

http://sunnypower.blogspot.com/2008/02/gpa_27.html
http://sunnypower.blogspot.com/2008/09/blog-post.html

The latter entry also contains a story about how I exited the student housing department website.

I interviewed 8+ people and selected 3, one for each of the university websites I'm maintaining.
For the housing department site, I gave the new webmaster FTP access two weeks before my exit, so that he could have a look at my code (it's before I have git).
He found FTP inconvenient, so he uploaded an ASP Trojan horse in order to browse the files.

I had a script that digests every file in the website folder and detect any unexpected differences.
During my daily check, I noticed an unexpected file, and then found the Trojan horse.
I was very surprised that my extremely secure website got hacked - the folders aren't writable by IIS user and non HTTP ports cannot be accessed off-campus.

I found the IP address that accessed the Trojan horse, and sent a complaint to the university network operations center.
In response to the report, the switch port of the offending IP address was disabled.

Then, netadmin emailed me saying that the IP address is owned by one of our own, as I already listed his name as "upcoming webmaster".
I agreed to unblock them, and then called my successor telling him that he should have added an IP address check to his remote access script, and not just hiding it behind a long filename.
By that time, he and his roommates were without Internet for a whole day.
Hopefully he learned the lesson.

cybertech

@yoursunny said:

@Mason said:

@yoursunny said: His computer touched the ESC key on the server, so that the server stuck on the boot menu when I rebooted Windows.

That bastard, I hope he has minesweeper nightmares now!

He wouldn't.
The auditorium manager works with microphones and projectors.
He doesn't know much about websites.

He had a student to make a website for the auditorium, hosted on the same server.
The main purpose of that site is to publish a PDF form for auditorium rentals, which should be downloaded, filled, and faxed in.

I found the website crashing all the time.
It's an ASP.Net site and there's no source code, so I can't fix it.
After talking to the higher ups, I extracted the PDF forms out of the database and posted in a corner of our website, and turned off his website.
There were no fuss about this one, because the moneymaker is the PDF: auditorium rental to entities outside the university is billable by the hour.

---

@cybertech said:

@yoursunny said:
sometimes taking pretty girls to school cafeteria for dinners,

proof or it didn't happen

Sure, here are two Blogger entries where I mentioned taking someone to dinner.

http://sunnypower.blogspot.com/2008/02/gpa_27.html
http://sunnypower.blogspot.com/2008/09/blog-post.html

The latter entry also contains a story about how I exited the student housing department website.

I interviewed 8+ people and selected 3, one for each of the university websites I'm maintaining.
For the housing department site, I gave the new webmaster FTP access two weeks before my exit, so that he could have a look at my code (it's before I have git).
He found FTP inconvenient, so he uploaded an ASP Trojan horse in order to browse the files.

I had a script that digests every file in the website folder and detect any unexpected differences.
During my daily check, I noticed an unexpected file, and then found the Trojan horse.
I was very surprised that my extremely secure website got hacked - the folders aren't writable by IIS user and non HTTP ports cannot be accessed off-campus.

I found the IP address that accessed the Trojan horse, and sent a complaint to the university network operations center.
In response to the report, the switch port of the offending IP address was disabled.

Then, netadmin emailed me saying that the IP address is owned by one of our own, as I already listed his name as "upcoming webmaster".
I agreed to unblock them, and then called my successor telling him that he should have added an IP address check to his remote access script, and not just hiding it behind a long filename.
By that time, he and his roommates were without Internet for a whole day.
Hopefully he learned the lesson.

too technical for me to understand, but had not found the girls pictures. thanks for even replying me though, sunnyboy.

Muffin

Dustin - the man who now runs Racknerd. It was year 2012 I think?
But even before that, I used the free web hosting site freewebs / geocities year 2005? At the age of 10 ...

antibomb

VPS: Ramnode 128MB to bypass public wifi login
Web: free hosting from hostinger

james50a

First provider for me was chicago vps. Stayed with them for years until the default ubuntu template wouldnt even work anymore. Sadly they dont appear to be bankrupt currently

Harambe

First VPS ever was SliceHost I think. First LE* providers were BuyVM & Ramnode circa 2013-ish.

Shared hosting was.. MediaTemple I think, back in mid 00's

jureve

My first VPS provider was from URPad.net

jam

shared hosting? Hostmonster
vps from green forums? Crissic
Non green forums vps? DigitalOcean
Dedicated? Kimsufi.

ialexpw

One of the first I went with was Heart Internet, probably 10-15 years ago now. I also hosted with Lithium Hosting for a couple of years before moving onto VPS' and dedicated more often. Good to see that Lithium is still around and it seems they use ApisCP now too.