How we started twelve years ago, how Master Internet helped us and why we stayed.
A note to begin with: this article aims to share our good experience with Master Internet and recommend it to other organizations. We want to thank our colleagues for their excellent work.
The original idea to start vpsFree.cz came in September 2008, and we began looking for a server. It ended up being an ordinary tower PC, so we had to find a datacenter willing to put something like that on a shelf. Not everyone is willing to host such a machine.
I was a student then, and my only income was a small allowance for good grades. Master Internet was the only company willing to talk to us. The datacenter manager, Petr Štěpánek, spoke to us directly and was as helpful as he could be. We eventually agreed on a 50% discount for the first six months, which brought the price down to roughly that allowance.
Master expected us to grow from the start, so they set aside a shelf for us to add servers later without having to move. We stayed that way through our first five servers, all ordinary PCs without remote management. That took effort, particularly from Master's support team, who ran around our machines carrying out all sorts of remote interventions.
This is one of Master's great strengths. The technicians are always willing to step in and even make nontrivial hardware changes. Since we are scattered across the country, this is a big help and still makes managing our servers easier today.
During 2010, we decided to put servers in Bratislava too, but after a while it became clear we could not find a reasonably good datacenter there at a normal price. So at the end of 2010, we decided to move the Slovak servers to Master in Brno. At the same time, we moved all our Prague servers from shelves into a normal rack, which meant transferring them from towers to ordinary rackmount chassis. Master gave us a 50% discount again.
When I was starting my own company, I tried to arrange a datacenter in the United States and was surprised by the trouble I encountered. Remote hands are far from standard there, and when available, the prices are absurd. The technicians could not even follow very detailed instructions with photos. We tried three companies in turn and were not satisfied with any of them. So in the end, we decided to move everything to Master too.
Master Internet has been our long-term partner from the beginning and has helped us at least twice. Without them, we probably would never have started, and certainly would not have grown to our current size. The biggest advantage is how quickly people from management start dealing with you directly. You can feel that it is not an impersonal corporation with management behind an impenetrable wall. Whenever we came up with something beyond our abilities, they decided to help.
In fact, it was a lucky choice made by chance right at the start. Master is somewhere you want to start and then stay.