Building a business on FreeBSD
Posted by Chris Hardie on November 17th, 2008This article was originally written for publication in a trade magazine about the BSD family of operating systems; it’s been updated slightly since then.
When a friend and I started our technology business 11 years ago in 1997, we didn’t choose FreeBSD, it chose us. But we’re sure glad it did, and we came to build our company on FreeBSD.
We started out with a focus on graphic design and website development. We were small, starting out in a college dorm room, but with high aspirations about what we could do for the world. It was only after a few projects that we realized we needed a place to send our clients for hosting the websites we had just built for them. When we asked a friend who was involved in running a small local dial-up Internet Service Provider where to host, he offered us some space on one of their servers, where they were already hosting a number of websites.
We got our FTP username and password, and we were off and running. We eventually co-located with that local ISP, and partnered with them enough that they gave us shell access on that shared web hosting server, and eventually even root access. It was a FreeBSD box running version 2.1 of the operating system.
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