John Samuelson Email & Phone Number

Sandy Springs, Ga

We were one of the first mom and pop colocation webhosting facilities in the country. We started during the dot com explosion, and worked straight through the dot bomb era, watching startups come and go through our facilities. We began as network admins for the parent company, Capital Investment Advisors, but it was a small firm that did not require full time support, so we cast out in different directions hoping to build a company utilizing investments from the parent company, which they provided in hopes that it would offset their cost for IT support. We put the first colo clients onto wire racks in the middle of the carpeted floor in the rented office space, and sold bandwidth from our T-1. But the differentiator was an advertisement we placed in one of the trade magazines (long time ago, there are no more trade magazines now for this industry). Our ad said: "$99 colo!" At the time, there was no access for individuals and start ups to colocation facilities, the data centers were all owned by big corporations like IBM, and you had to know someone or have very deep pockets to get in one of them. Well, the following month after our ad came out, there were a couple of similar ads that came out along with ours, companies on the west coast offering low cost colocation services. The month after that there were lots of similar ads, growing in number each month, but we were the first to do it, as far as we knew. Soon after than, the parent company purchased a building up the street, and I went to work in the basement constructing the colo space, control room and raised flooring clean rooms, and as a data center tech and network administrator after we opened, and Head of Marketing after seven years. We grew to a point where we had seven bonded T-1s, but when we dug fiber into the building and purchased our own Metro Fiber ring around the city, we became much more viable. The company is still in operation today.