25 years, in photos
The Journey
I started writing HTML at 11, built my first home lab in my teens, and racked my first production server in a proper data centre a few years later. The short version of how G7Cloud got built, in photos — from a 2004 bedroom desk to a modern data-centre cabinet running 500+ tenant apps today.
- 2001 – 2004
Raw HTML and two keyboards
I started coding at 11, hand-writing HTML and FTP-ing it up to free hosts. By 14 the bedroom desk had become the command centre. Long before hosting was a product — it was a hobby that wouldn't let go.
- ~2008
The home lab
Where I taught myself the fundamentals — routing, switching, how networks actually behave under load. Messy, noisy, and completely irreplaceable.
- 2012
One server, one VM, an idea
The first time I set up my own server properly and ran my own VMs. No plan for a hosting platform yet — just the itch to run my own infrastructure and learn it top-to-bottom.
- 2018
First rack in a real data centre
The jump from home lab to colocation. A cage, a VISITOR lanyard, and servers I could actually lean production traffic on. The concerns changed overnight — redundant power, cabling discipline, remote hands — not whether the fans would bother the neighbours.
- 2019
Scaling up
More compute, more storage, more networking. The year the lab really turned into infrastructure — capacity planning became a weekly thing, not an annual one.
- 2020 – 2023
From hardware to a platform
Cleaner racks, boring parts doing their job well. This is where it stopped being 'my servers' and started being G7Cloud — a platform with customers, SLAs, and a roadmap.
- Today
G7Cloud, fully grown
The platform that powers 500+ tenant apps at 99.99% uptime. Different scale, same obsession with reliability I had when it was one box on a desk — just with a lot more kit under it.
