The Billion Dollar Server
As technology enthusiasts, we have self-hosted websites and blogs for over 20 years. The site www.terrorism.com site was originally run from a server on Matt Devost’s basement coffee table, but we long ago migrated to a proper hosting environment in a friend’s rack at a major data center in Ashburn, VA.
Over the years, we’ve often offered to host a new site on the server for a friend, start-up we are advising, or non-profit/community organization. When contemplating the value of the companies that were first hosted on the server, we realized that it exceeded one billion dollars, thus making this little Dell server a “billion dollar server”.
The list of companies hosted on the box thus far include:
- FusionX (acquired by Accenture)
- iSIGHT Partners dev site (acquired by FireEye for $275m)
- Carbon Black ($1.6b IPO)
- Terrorism Research Center, Inc. (acquired by EP Investments)
- Terrorism Early Warning Group Collab (pre-cursor to DHS Fusion Centers)
- HomelandSecurity.com
- FedCyber conference
- OODA LLC
- Kyrus Technology
- Pedaling for Patriots (raised over $1m for charity)
- Great Leap Brewing (one of China’s most popular micro-breweries)
- Technical Security Countermeasures Corp
- Disruptive Solutions LLC
- Opsurv
A pretty decent run for our humble server. Want to be next?