2013 Year End Review

12/31/2013
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3 Minutes, 18 Second
Written By John Marx

Tags: Business

Even though our first "true" year isn't officially done as we opened our doors in March of 2013 the first fiscal year is now coming to a close. 2013 was a great year for us and the light in the tunnel is getting brighter each day. As such, we want to thank all of our current customers and those that are already coming on board in early 2014 as it is because of you that we are able to do what we love to do. We would also like to give a warm welcome to those that will be joining us in 2014 and beyond as well because you are the reason we continue to grow.

The past year has been truly great and has exceeded are highest expectations. 2014 we know will as we've set our goals even higher for this year.

2013 Major Milestones

March - We started out with our first server which ran everything (web, email, data analytics and our database server).

May - We had to double our server count to two and split off our email so that we could handle the increased storage needs required for our growing small businesses and enterprise accounts we added.

July - We added our first employee, Matt, outside of the ownership team for handling our search engine optimization (SEO) efforts which is a very solid focus for us and our customers. We also started the process of an annual scholarship fund for local college students to help them out in the technology sector. From what we can tell this is the first one for technology in the area which we hope will help our area grow to become very strong technologically.

August - The size and speed of requests was putting a toll on the web server because we were sharing the database and web server together. We split the database server off onto its own server so we were now at three servers and were on tract to exceed the first year’s expectations four months ahead of schedule.

November - We had exceeded our expectations five months ahead of our best estimates. Thank you! As such, we had to make a serious business model change. We were leasing our equipment but buying all of our software that we needed. The problem was we knew by March 2014, our one year anniversary, that we would be getting closer to capacity again. We had to make some very serious changes. We opted to dig deep and prepare for the long haul. We made our first serious investment in server hardware to go along with our software purchases. We are now at seven servers (three web servers (development, test and production), two email servers (primary and backup), an application server and our database server. With the server purchase we also increased our capacity for each server by a minimum of 6-fold.

December - Our new servers are now installed, fully tested and already taking on some serious loads from our customers and doing exactly what they should be. We also started working with our second hire, Sam, who will be working with us on web development projects. He was also our scholarship winner for Purdue North Central! Talking with him was quite a challenge at first as he sent us his resume after we had chosen a winner for the scholarship and wanted to know how he did. We couldn't tell him that he was the one that won as the school hadn't told him yet. We finished December with our first company Christmas party at Gelsosomo's Pizzeria in Michigan City.

In the coming year we will be keeping our backup, network monitoring, licensing, DNS and development versioning (Team Foundation) servers separate as these areas are not where our core business focus is. We are already planning on further hardware expansions as well as additional geo-redundancy for all of our customers, all with no increase in yearly hosting for our customers.

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