

Ask HN: I just sold the company… now what? - nivals

Background, I started a B2B data backup company at the end of 2005/early 2006 worked on it for several years before realizing that I was missing something in my personal development that was limiting my success.<p>I love solving hard problems, building products, love hardware and building/maintaining bare metal servers. I did not like the sales/biz dev side of things. In an effort to continue my professional development, I decided to move to NYC and get a masters degree. Before the move I turned over the management of the business to others. While in NYC I was fortunate to work at two of the hottest startups in town, I learned a lot about myself and scaling businesses.<p>Fast forward six years, the business continued to grow even in the face of stiff competition and plunging prices for cloud storage/online backup. A month ago the business sold to a larger competitor.<p>Over the years we moved data centers (twice!) and completely rebuilt our infrastructure three times. We made mistakes and a few good decisions. The best decision we made was in our last data center move.<p>HN, here is where I need some help: I'm left with a few things… lots of hardware, storage, bandwidth, and rack space.<p>At this point I'm trying to figure out what do with all of this stuff. I don't want to shell out the cash for the data center space each month if I don't have a use for it, however I will never get a deal like this again and don't want to give it up… I really love not being a slave to Amazon/Linode and hosting with my own servers.<p>If someone has any ideas I'd love to hear em… or if you have servers that would be too expensive to host elsewhere because of bandwidth costs, I'd be happy to host them for you without any bandwidth fees. Just cover the costs of power. I've got a gigabit right now that is billed at a flat rate so bandwidth hogs and services like that are ideal.
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shanelja
I apologize for the vague post but I saw an article earlier on about how some
supposedly fantastic (wiggles?) widget company was unable to pay their hosting
costs and was having to scale back and shut down, hopefully someone seeing
this post can point you in the right direction but I'm sure that you guys
could come to an amicable and affordable solution!

\----- EDIT -----

Just spent 15 minutes searching furiously and managed to find this:
<http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=8457> \- that's the page which the
HN link led to, here is the link to the HN page:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5058788>

Quite surprised I managed to remember and find that but hopefully I've helped
to create something good today!

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nivals
That's exactly the kind of thing that makes sense! Hopefully this will get us
connected.

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nivals
Just reached out to Duane on the Chumby boards. Hopefully he gets in touch.

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shanelja
Great! I'm off to bed now, so please, post here or email me, let me know how
it goes!

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brudgers
Why not look at the numbers and come up with a specific "Offer HN?"

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nivals
Did not know such a thing existed?

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brudgers
There were a lot of them around the holidays in 2011. Not so common now, but
from time to time they occur.

The unofficial purpose is to provide a mechanism for people to give something
back to the community. So the value proposition should be heavily skewed away
from the offering person - e.g. free goods or services is obviously
consistent, market rate goods and services are obviously not. Anything in
between may be seen one way or the other by the community.

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orangethirty
May you provide an email address?

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nivals
Just emailed the address in your profile so I don't get spambot'd.

