Most of us use infrastructure provided by companies like DigitalOcean and AWS. Some of us choose to work on that infrastructure. And some of us are really built different and choose to build all that infrastructure from scratch.

This post is a real treat for me to bring you. I met Diana through a friend of mine, and I've gotten some peeks behind the curtain as she builds a new hosting provider. So I was thrilled that she agreed to an interview to let me share some of that with you all.

So, here it is: a peek behind the curtain of a new hosting provider, in a very early stage. This is the interview as transcribed (any errors are mine), with a few edits as noted for clarity.

Nicole: Hi, Diana! Thanks for taking the time to do this. Can you start us off by just telling us a little bit about who you are and what your company does?

Diana: So I'm Diana, I'm trans, gay, AuDHD and I like to create, mainly singing and 3D printing. I also have dreams of being the change I want to see in the world. Since graduating high school, all infrastructure has become a passion for me. Particularly networking and computer infrastructure. From your home internet connection to data centers and everything in between.

This has led me to create Andromeda Industries and the dba Gigabit.Host. Gigabit.Host is a hosting service where the focus is affordable and performant host for individuals, communities, and small businesses.

Let's start out talking about the business a little bit. What made you decide to start a hosting company?

The lack of performance for a ridiculous price. The margins on hosting is ridiculous, it's why the majority of the big tech companies' revenue comes from their cloud offerings. So my thought has been why not take that and use it more constructively. Instead of using the margins to crush competition while making the rich even more wealthy, use those margins for good.

What is the ethos of your company?

To use the net profits from the company to support and build third spaces and other low return/high investment cost ventures. From my perspective, these are the types of ideas that can have the biggest impact on making the world a better place. So this is my way of adopting socialist economic ideas into the systems we currently have and implementing the changes.

How big is the company? Do you have anyone else helping out?

It’s just me for now, though the plan is to make it into a co-op or unionized business. I have friends and supporters of the project, giving feedback and suggesting improvements.

What does your average day-to-day look like?

I go to my day job during the week, and work on the company in my spare time. I have alerts and monitors that warn me when something needs addressing, overall operations are pretty hands off.

You're a founder, and founders have to wear all the hats. How have you managed your work-life balance while starting this?

At this point it’s more about balancing my job, working on the company, and taking care of my cat. It's unfortunately another reason that I started this endeavor, there just aren't spaces I'd rather be than home, outside of a park or hiking. All of my friends are online and most say the same, where would I go?

Hosting businesses can be very capital intensive to start. How do you fund it?

Through my bonuses and stocks currently, also through using more cost effective brands that are still reliable and performant.

What has been the biggest challenge of operating it from a business perspective?

Getting customers. I'm not a huge fan of marketing and have been using word of mouth as the primary method of growing the business.

Okay, my part here then haha. If people want to sign up, how should they do that?

If people are interested in getting service, they can request an invite through this link: https://portal.gigabit.host/invite/request.

What has been the most fun part of running a hosting company?

Getting to actually be hands on with the hardware and making it as performant as possible. It scratches an itch of eking out every last drop of performance. Also not doing it because it's easy, doing it because I thought it would be easy.

What has been the biggest surprise from starting Gigabit.Host?

How both complex and easy it has been at the same time. Also how much I've been learning and growing through starting the company.

What're some of the things you've learned?

It's been learning that wanting it to be perfect isn't realistic, taking the small wins and building upon and continuing to learn as you go. My biggest learning challenge was how to do frontend work with Typescript and styling, the backend code has been easy for me. The frontend used to be my weakness, now it could be better, and as I add new features I can see it continuing to getting better over time.

Now let's talk a little bit about the tech behind the scenes. What does the tech stack look like?

Next.js and Typescript for the front and backend. Temporal is used for provisioning and task automation. Supabase is handling user management Proxmox for the hardware virtualization

How do you actually manage this fleet of VMs? For the customer side we only handle the initial provisioning, then the customer is free to use whatever tool they choose. The provisioning of the VMs is handled using Go and Temporal. For our internal services we use Ansible and automation scripts.

[Nicole: the code running the platform is open source, so you can take a look at how it's done in the repository!]

How do your technical choices and your values as a founder and company work together? They are usually in sync, the biggest struggle has been minimizing cost of hardware. While I would like to use more advanced networking gear, it's currently cost prohibitive.

Which choices might you have made differently? [I would have] gathered more capital before getting started. Though that's me trying to be a perfectionist, when the reality is buy as little as possible and use what you have when able.

This seems like a really hard business to be in since you need reliability out of the gate. How have you approached that?

Since I've been self-funding this endeavor, I've had to forgo high availability for now due to costs. To work around that I've gotten modern hardware for the critical parts of the infrastructure. This so far has enabled us to achieve 90%+ uptime, with the current goal to add redundancy as able to do so.

What have been the biggest technical challenges you've run into?

Power and colocation costs. Colocation is expensive in Seattle. Around 8x the cost of my previous colo in Atlanta, GA. Power has been the second challenge, running modern hardware means higher power requirements. Most data centers outside of hyperscalers are limited to 5 to 10 kW per rack. This limits the hardware and density, thankfully for now it [is] a future struggle.

Huge thanks to Diana for taking the time out of her very busy for this interview! And thank you to a few friends who helped me prepare for the interview.