Edo van Royen

A webhost which stood out because of overzealous customer service. Clients payed premium prices to get extra features such as: 1-hour response time to mail, sms alerts and live support during weekends.

Milestones

04-04-2004

Youngbits officially registered at the chamber of commerce. As a partnership between Daniel Lippens and me.

13-06-2004

First website online.

23-09-2004

After repeated crashed, downtime and other issues. We decide to stop outsourcing and invest in servers which we would host at the XS4ALL datacenter in Amsterdam.

17-01-2005

We decide to divest and start hosting gameservers under the name "Serverking, because high ping sucks"

09-02-2005

First website Serverking.nl online.

25-03-2005

Serverking's 10th customer.

28-03-2005

New youngbits website designed by JJ goes online. We were very proud. Website screenshot is not complete but it should suffice.

19-04-2005

Major server outage. To our frustration, clients go without e-mail and websites for two consecutive days.

24-05-2005

First time we ever did taxes, what a mess, took us the entire day to understand.

28-05-2005

Serverking website redesigned, again by JJ.

12-07-2005

Youngbits's 7th customer, growth was quite slow.

28-09-2005

Major outage causes website and mailserver to be offline for 20 hours.

07-11-2005

Our first stab at marketing. Not really a serious attempt, we just had a lot of fun dreaming of how this would be on billboards all across Amsterdam ;) . "When the shit hits the fan, call youngbits man!"

28-02-2006

Third (Supermicro) server purchased.

03-07-2006

Serverking goes to swim with the fishes. The decision has been made because margin on gameservers was too low versus high maintenance required.

24-03-2007

Minor outage causes website and mailserver to be offline for 4 hours.

24-05-2007

The final major marketing/website overhaul to increase youngbits's market share and value. See screenshots at the top of the project page.

01-06-2007

Daniel leaves youngbits to work at national radiostation SlamFM.

28-06-2007

Stopped hosting on in-house managed servers, and started renting a managed dedicated server at ATN-Networks with a solid SLA. So there would be no reason to worry about the servers anymore.

26-08-2008

Started negotiations to sell youngbits.

03-10-2008

Youngbits finally sold to Guido Terhorst. On the same day I wrote the following post on my blog:

Today is the day I got to say goodbye to youngbits, a company which I have run since 2004. Let’s take a dive into the rich history of what has been a fantastic learning experience.

I remember the day I stepped into the Amsterdam Chamber of commerce together with Daniel Lippens, both 14 years old and at the time pretty audacious. Together we wanted to launch a company. What kind of company didn’t matter, as long as we could be one of the big boys, be part of the grownup world. So we did. We registered ourselves and found a name that represented us and our ideas: youngbits.

youngbits, as we decided, was going to be a webhosting company. That the market was already pretty much saturated wasn’t a cause for much debate. It was an easy start into the world of entrepeneuring and we had some ideas on how to do things better. We started by outsourcing our servers to the States, which at the time seemed like a great idea. Why didn’t all the hosting companies already reduce on costs by going overseas? What happened just confirms that things never turn out to be quite as simple as they sound..

Webhosting, a tricky business indeed

We found what we thought to be a reliable provider, and started hosting on a dedicated computer in America. Things went well in the first three months and business was slowly gaining momentum. Then the shit hit the fan, the server went down for two days. From that point on things went downhill. Constantly we were barraged with downtime and bad connectivity untill we finally decided to move our stuff back to the Netherlands.

XS4ALL

We took our refuge in the KPN building in the XS4ALL datacenter. Something pretty spectacular, because this time around we had to actually physically meddle ourselves in server technology. Amid the raging sound of hundreds of blowfans we mounted them in their racks, ominously announcing the second phase for youngbits…

Because we now had to physically take care of the servers things got a lot more complicated. When things would go wrong we had to drop what we were doing, and go to the KPN building. And boy, did things go wrong! An account of one of those sleepless nights:

I was sitting in class on a Tuesday, high school, learning ancient Greek when my phone rang. I instantly knew what was wrong, and after reading Daniel’s alerting sms my fears were confirmed. The servers were down! Without hesitation I grabbed my coat and left in a hurry to the KPN building. Somewhat dazed and confused I met with Daniel in front of the gate, and together we went in for the kill.

Stressed out by multiple customers complaining about our downtime we set to work. Today, we can laugh about the days that followed, but then we certainly could not. It shouldn’t surpise you, reader, that I recall these days as the most difficult in the history of youngbits. The fact that we got ripped from our daily lives still gives me the chills but more horrifying is that we went without sleep for the following 72 hours to come! Horrible, long, cold and stressful days those were. Working in shifts, with no outlook on an outcome.

It was on a Friday when we solved the problem. Finally we could go home tired, relieved that we accomplished what we came to do. But determined that this was the last time this would ever happen.

A fresh start

A year passed, and Daniel Lippens got himself a job at SlamFM as a DJ (June, 2007). youngbits was now fully owned by me, and I decided that I would never want lay awake at night again wondering if the servers would go down or not. I made a fresh start, and started renting a dedicated managed server at ATN-Networks, where youngbits is still hosted to date. An excellent host that took all the technicalities of hosting out of my hands so I could focus on other aspects of the company, such as marketing, and other fun stuff with which I could experiment.

I created a true brand out of youngbits and learned a lot by perfecting the processess behind youngbits. I started learning about financing and installed an advanced invoice system. I fully automized youngbits, and created a healthy and strong firm which would be able to last for many years to come.

Finally, goodbye

Things started to itch, I was in the hosting business for 4 years and learned everything about hosting. youngbits was a closed chapter for me, and I wanted to move on. I found a reliable and trustworthy person that wanted to continue with youngbits, and make it into the company that I always dreamed it to be. Today was that day. Together with Guido Terhorst (youngbits new happy owner) we went to the chamber of commerce to finalize our deal.

As a first attempt at business youngbits gets graded at a 7 out of 10. This grade consists of two factors:

- profitability
- gained knowledge

I have graded youngbits a 5 in profitability because sales never really took off, we made profit and a good exit nonetheless but we didn’t manage to penetrate the market. In gained knowledge I grade youngbits a whopping 9, no school can match what I learned by dealing with customers and solving the many, many problems we encountered.

Nothing else would’ve prepared me better for business than youngbits did, and I would never trade in anything for the experience I have gained over the past years. youngbits, thank you, and … goodbye !