Way back in the mid 90’s, the company I worked at could see this internet thing was going to catch on. Email was still uncommon in most businesses you dealt with and website sizes were measured in kilobytes or they killed your 14.4k modem. We took the very expensive step of buying a leased line. 128k that was eyewateringly expensive. On the end of that sat a few Windows servers. They got broken into. We changed software, they got broken into. It was painful to say the least. I had some very basic UNIX experience from looking after a few old servers, so I downloaded Linux and ran that. It got broken into. At this point, I decided to try FreeBSD. Within a few months every critical machine internet connected or not ran it and the whole thing ticked like a watch. We’d learnt about firewalls and the need for updating the hard way. 20 years later it’s a lot easier to get on the net, and the speed and quality that we worked so hard to squeeze out of what we had is lost on most people. I still obsess about getting the most out of the kit I have (although it’s now racks worth with ample excess capacity) and that’s what I believe sets us apart from everyone else. You can buy it cheaper, you can get a higher speed (on paper at least) but you don’t get the experience we’ve had put into maintaining and tuning your server. You also don’t need to wrestle with control panels – just ask and we’ll get it done.