This is an official announcement.

While being in Japan, I finally decided to start once again the experience. For those who knew me for a while, they know I’ve been involved in many web-hosting company creations, either indirectly (RYA-Network) or directly (ooKoo, etc).

Here is a list of companies involved in web hosting I’ve been involved in:

  • 1999: Upsilon Studio (legally declared as “association” in France), my first involvement in web hosting, without servers, and with free domains from namezero and hosting from various places…
  • 2001: FF.ST (declared as a company mid-2001, collapsed end of 2001 at the same time the WTC did) created, first servers in USA. Automated web hosting system, and various things…
  • 2002: helped in Kalyweb/Kalyone while still managing FF.ST (and installed my own server there too). Was going nice, but there was some problems I’m not fully aware of (was too young), and the whole thing went down without any second though about customers (searching for “kalyone” on Google France might give some results)
    One of my best experience there was R&D work, and configuration of Cisco hardware (especially Cisco 6204VXR, and cisco switches)
  • 2003: RYA-Network (with some of the guys from Kalyone), where I could use some of my past experience and improve many things. This allowed me to discover the datacenters world in Paris, with visits in different datacenters. Soon problems arised with unhappy customers, mainly because of poor sales methods, and I got kicked out while customers were sold to a third party (or so it seems).
    Today the RYA Network website is still up, displaying offers from another time (who wants a 10MB webhosting? A dedicated server with 500Mhz CPU/64MB ram/786kbps bandwidth under Debian 3.0?), and the company seems to be still existing.
  • 2006: Created “ooKoo” as a company, while overseas. This went pretty good until war started, which virtually made every customer go away, mainly because of frequent power loss at our “office” (power loss itself wasn’t a problem, but the fact ISP was going down with power too wasn’t nice). Had to go back to France in hurry (and of course the area we were in, while experiencing half-day long power losses, was not in an area covered by the country for war-related problems).
  • 2007: Back in France, creation of “Kinoko“, with less focus on web hosting and more focus on software development. Because I’m working full-time in another company, haven’t got enough time to make it work as it should.
  • 2009: finally, while in Japan, creation of K.K. Tibanne. I believe past experience have taught me many things including (but not limited to):
    • Working fulltime at the same time is a bad idea, unless there is a point in time where “things must work no matter what”. I resigned from my current work, and still have a few weeks there. I’m a bit sleep deprivated lately (mainly because I’m handling two works at the same time) but things are progressing at a good pace.
    • Having external investors is a pain, and can become a risk when they start to have their own ideas about how the company should be run while they were silent for the mast months and have no idea of how webhosting works
    • Sales staff can mess up everything if they do not have strict rules  they need to abide to. In one of the previous company I heared a story of a sales guy selling lifetime server at MacDonald’s, getting cash money from the customer, and few weeks/months later customer came back wondering when he’ll get his server (and ended punching someone).
    • Being nice with competitors and avoiding to attack market when the opportunity appears is a bad thing. They won’t care about you anyway.
    • Going in a country with unstable borders and war history can be really bad for overseas business. In a global world like the one we live in today, this is not acceptable.

I also accumulated a nice amount of networking experience (thanks to full-time jobs too, where I also could peek at some cisco IOS/CATOS configurations for a complex network with two AS, BGP uplinks, etc) and have a global understanding of how internet works (ip announces, dns system, etc). Created companies also taught me a lot about company management, legal requirements, taxes, etc (while laws in Japan are different, they are not that different).

Now, let’s make things work and start with web hosting, which is an activity requiring a lot of technical knowledge and that if done right can attract a lot of customers.