This is the story of the VPS and how it came to be:
In August of 2001 I was flying from Denver to San Diego to do some contract datacenter work.
I had a Toshiba Libretto 110CT that was running FreeBSD and I was trying to troubleshoot an OS config issue, so I tried jail. It gave me a complete, new FreeBSD system inside of a directory.
Then a lightbulb went on ...
A month later I posted beta invites to the cDc and 303 mailing lists and in December "JohnCompanies" was born. I advertised almost solely on kuro5hin.org and grew the company from my apartment in Aspen, Colorado. In February, 2004, I sold the company.
We called them "server instances", but "VPS" is the name that eventually caught on.
JohnCompanies still lives on today. Not sure where they'd fit on the "VPS Compare" list. I see our ad is still up on kuro5hin, if only because Rusty is too lazy to remove it, after more than 10 years...
The backup system(s) that we built for JohnCompanies customers was reworked and launched as a standalone product in 2006. You know it as "rsync.net".
I believe it was independent reinvention, because the paper by Poul-Henning Kamp and Robert Watson regarding FreeBSD Jails, which was presented at a conference in 2000, says
"The jail facility has already seen widespread deployment in particular as a vehicle for delivering "virtual private server" services."
I'm not sure who that would have been. The crowds I ran with (Defcon, Blackhat, Hope) and the crowds I advertised with (k5, Slashdot) had never seen a "VPS" service before, and at no point in 2001 did we have any competition.
As I said, we struggled to even name it, settling on calling it a "server instance", and only later did we see others referring to them as "virtual private servers".
I will say that as I did my (lame, cursory) market analysis in sept/oct 2001, I did see some bizarro product from Verio where (IIRC) they were renting out slices of Sun e10ks that they had. It was exorbitantly expensive and I don't even remember if you got a proper root login ... but other than that, there was nothing.
We started bytemark.co.uk around the same time, with the same lightbulb, using User-Mode Linux which was way slower :) We're still selling virtual machines (using KVM), and dedicated servers at bigv.io which I submitted to the site, and have our own data centre in York. It's still a great business to be in.
In February of 2002 I decided we should have a linux offering, and I hacked away at UML almost non-stop for about two weeks ... but it really didn't go anywhere for me.
So later in 2002 ... perhaps August ... we licensed Virtuozzo and used that. It was ext2 only at that point and man did that cause a lot of pain ...
No, no. In fact, I wouldn't say that I invented anything at all. It was just the combination of off the shelf items (FreeBSD, jail, colocated servers, various management programs we wrote) that was unique at the time.
In 2001 a colo'd server could be very, very expensive. I think our starting price for a "server instance" was $65/mo and people were ecstatic about that.
In August of 2001 I was flying from Denver to San Diego to do some contract datacenter work.
I had a Toshiba Libretto 110CT that was running FreeBSD and I was trying to troubleshoot an OS config issue, so I tried jail. It gave me a complete, new FreeBSD system inside of a directory.
Then a lightbulb went on ...
A month later I posted beta invites to the cDc and 303 mailing lists and in December "JohnCompanies" was born. I advertised almost solely on kuro5hin.org and grew the company from my apartment in Aspen, Colorado. In February, 2004, I sold the company.
We called them "server instances", but "VPS" is the name that eventually caught on.
JohnCompanies still lives on today. Not sure where they'd fit on the "VPS Compare" list. I see our ad is still up on kuro5hin, if only because Rusty is too lazy to remove it, after more than 10 years...
The backup system(s) that we built for JohnCompanies customers was reworked and launched as a standalone product in 2006. You know it as "rsync.net".