Half of every paycheck went into this.
I paid for the first servers with wages from Rema 1000. Half of every paycheck went straight into the company — not investment, not a loan, not family money. Shifts. That's why the first year was so careful. Every machine was money I had already worked for, so I bought exactly what I needed and nothing else.
VPS plans started at $2.30 a month. That was the whole proposition — cheap, honest servers for people who didn't need much and didn't want to pay for more. It also meant the margins were thin enough that every wasted krone showed up immediately.
At the start I rented dedicated servers from other providers, because renting is what you do when you can't afford to be wrong about hardware. A few months in, once the revenue was steady enough to justify it, I bought our own dedicated machines and moved everything across.
Year one still ran at a loss. Everything that came in went back into hardware, and for a long stretch the supermarket was paying for the servers rather than the other way around. Then it started to grow — slowly, then properly — and eventually it paid for itself several times over.
I ran both companies alone. Provisioning, billing, the control panel, the network, support tickets — all of it, all the time. When something broke there was nobody else to call and no shift that ended. That isn't a boast, it's just what a small hosting operation actually is, and it's the part people underestimate from the outside.
The servers were never the hard part. Customers were.
Hardware is honest. A failing disk tells you it's failing, and you can reason your way to the fix. But someone angry about a service costing a few kroner a month, late at night, wanting an answer now — there's no runbook for that. I learned to answer anyway, and to answer calmly, and that turned out to be the more useful skill. Most of what I know about running a business came out of difficult tickets, not out of the stack.
Three years of that is why I shut them down on my own terms rather than letting them rot. I'd rather close something properly than keep it alive out of habit.