So, you know what that picture is? That’s our new, most expensive product.

Perhaps the reseller series went to our heads. We have decided to begin offering Virtual Private and Dedicated Servers. If you just want to know about the new stuff, see the VPS’s here, and the Dedicated Servers here.

Now we’re going to take a trip down memory lane and explain why we’ve never gone here, and why we decided to do it now.

Since 1997, DrakNet’s been providing shared web hosting to a lot of people. Frankly, we never thought when we started that this would turn into an actual business - DrakNet was started as a no-name service off a now defunct non-profit site to help defray the cost of its hosting. That’s all it was ever supposed to do. When we opened up DrakNetFree in the spirit of that, people flocked to it. At one point, we had over 10,000 users on it. It in turn grew the “commercial” side of the business.

Long about the time that we hosted briefly at “Voldemort” (the data center that will not be named), we realized that (a) we had a real business and (b) people depended on it a lot and (c) we had gotten pretty good at it but not good enough to avoid be side-swiped by a terrible business decision and hanging out too long out of fear of what the writing on the wall would say if we looked. “Voldemort” was a hard lesson, and deflated our business and just about decimated our reputation. It took us about two years to regroup, and in that two years we - which is to say, I - became steadfastly determined to learn the ins and outs of everything about this business so that no one could ever pee on my leg and tell me its raining ever again.

That was about four or five years ago and in that time, we’ve managed somehow to build back that reputation that we lost. In all that time, everyone here has worked very, very hard to devote everything we have - money, time, effort - into the highest quality experience that we could give. In re-learning that, we have gotten really good at what we do. For those that know me personally, frankly, that’s very hard for me to say - I don’t take compliments, and I don’t like pats on the back. I’m weird that way.

But after ten years, I can say that we’re very, very good at what we do. Our hardware is so good that when we talk to our NOC about upgrading, you can almost hear them rolling their eyes through the phone because it’s so premature. We’re paranoid and passionate about doing a good job, and despite the fact that we don’t advertise anywhere, we’re growing steadily 7%-10% a year just based on our clients swearing that we’re the best thing since sliced bread and dragging whoever they meet that needs a web site here.

We never did VPS’s or servers except in very specific circumstances because we didn’t know that we could maintain the level of quality and service that people come to expect from us for everybody - shared hosting has a tendency to become the last priority when folks take on servers. Shared Hosting’s what built us, and we didn’t want that to happen.

What’s changed is that we’ve changed, and you’ve changed - we are very good at what we do, and we know our clients, and some of them have left because they needed bigger and better and we refused to provide it. You’ve built your sites and no matter how much some of you wanted to stay, you really needed more than shared hosting could provide technologically and with regret and apologies, you had to do what was right for your sites.

Our knowledge and experience is such that within the past year, our colleagues have paid us a lot of money to set up their boxes, to help them set up their hosting businesses, to train them in how to manage and admin servers and tweak cPanel within an inch of its life. Some of those folks had hosting companies bigger than ours. We did it for numerous people and companies.

Of course, we refused to do that for you. We’d send you off to someone else. Suddenly, that seemed a bit silly.

We grew into the capability to do all of it. We’ve chosen a server provider and VPS provider that’s known for solid uptime and good boxes, but who offer “budget” servers (and budget support) at lower prices. That enables us to step in and put the shine on the apple, so to speak. We’re only going to offer the operating system that we work on and utilize ourselves, ditto the control panel, because we’re mostly offering this new service for those of you that want it, and want to stay with us, and because we’re experts at the system we use day in and day out. That’s where our quality will be highest. The “public” at large may show up but, frankly, hopefully it will be because they “get it” and one of ya’ll brought them here.

So, yet again, we do things different - which is why most of ya’ll host here, I guess.

Our “press release” to announce a new product line is filled not with sales specials but contemplation, and a reassurance that we’re not doing this to change our focus and become some super-web-host but because if you get big and popular, we’d like you to be able to stay and feel we’ll take care of you and your site in all weather of bandwidth - the way an awful lot of you with us stuck through “Voldemort”.