Tachi

The capybara is my spirit animal. It embodies all I wish to be: a giant rodent that blocks traffic.

• Name: Nathan
• Age: 31
• Height: 5'6"
• Favorite food: Capybaras
• Favorite animal: Coffee

I also do room renovations. Sorta.

Who's This?

I'm Nathan. I started learning HTML as a kid and hosted my first web page on the old freeservers.com. Since then I've had an interest in websites and the technology behind them. In my teens, I began hosting forums and sites for people in online game communities (hello Cyber Nations players!). While I did launch a few web projects for myself, I found I had a lot more fun and interest in running the infrastructure for sites rather than the sites themselves. And so while most kids wanted to be astronauts or doctors, I wanted to be something much cooler: a web hoster.

Forward to high school and I took the plunge and started web hosting for real. With help from an Internet friend, I formed an LLC and started a hosting op for a niche web software. It had a few founding principles:

• Never oversell the servers
• Keep support fast and helpful at all times
• Be real to customers

It was a mild success and lasted a whole decade. Then it didn't and I switched to selling lumber and drywall tools. Such is life. But while lugging lumber is fun and all, I missed running a web host and all it entailed.

And Now the Service

So here we are. It's been a few years, but not a whole lot has changed in web hosting. Squarespace and Shopify rule the roost, but WordPress and others still hold the lion's share of the market. cPanel has gone to the dark side (PE) along with a few other cornerstone software. But people still want to host weird sites, and there are still weird people who want to host them (like me). And while stable income with a fixed schedule is nice, there's nothing like handling the daily operations of a web host and solving strange problems for people.

In comes Tachi, a hosting op run by this oddball for fun. Whether it's successful or not doesn't matter, as long as I can keep it running and enjoy it enough. It actually doesn't cost a whole lot to run:

$105 (a month)

How does that break down?

• The shared server itself: about $65/mo (EUR conversion)
• More servers (for Enhance, DNS, etc.): $20/mo
• Enhance: $10/mo
• Upmind: Nada for now

$105 ÷ $5 is 21. So I need 21 customers to reach the break-even point on this. But since this is for fun, that's not required. I'll consider this a success with even one customer.

How is this sustainable? It usually isn't, but I'm fortunate enough to have a job that allows me free time for things like this. If something changes and this becomes untenable, I won't fly off in the night. I'll make sure it's funded long enough to allow time to move to another host. And of course I'll help.