<story><title>VPS Compare – compare worldwide VPS servers</title><url>http://vpscomp.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rsync</author><text>This is the story of the VPS and how it came to be:&lt;p&gt;In August of 2001 I was flying from Denver to San Diego to do some contract datacenter work.&lt;p&gt;I had a Toshiba Libretto 110CT that was running FreeBSD and I was trying to troubleshoot an OS config issue, so I tried jail.  It gave me a complete, new FreeBSD system inside of a directory.&lt;p&gt;Then a lightbulb went on ...&lt;p&gt;A month later I posted beta invites to the cDc and 303 mailing lists and in December &amp;quot;JohnCompanies&amp;quot; was born.  I advertised almost solely on kuro5hin.org and grew the company from my apartment in Aspen, Colorado.  In February, 2004, I sold the company.&lt;p&gt;We called them &amp;quot;server instances&amp;quot;, but &amp;quot;VPS&amp;quot; is the name that eventually caught on.&lt;p&gt;JohnCompanies still lives on today.  Not sure where they&amp;#x27;d fit on the &amp;quot;VPS Compare&amp;quot; list.  I see our ad is still up on kuro5hin, if only because Rusty is too lazy to remove it, after more than 10 years...&lt;p&gt;The backup system(s) that we built for JohnCompanies customers was reworked and launched as a standalone product in 2006.  You know it as &amp;quot;rsync.net&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>icebraining</author><text>I believe it was independent reinvention, because the paper by Poul-Henning Kamp and Robert Watson regarding FreeBSD Jails, which was presented at a conference in 2000, says&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;The jail facility has already seen widespread deployment in particular as a vehicle for delivering &amp;quot;virtual private server&amp;quot; services.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sane.nl/events/sane2000/papers/kamp.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.sane.nl&amp;#x2F;events&amp;#x2F;sane2000&amp;#x2F;papers&amp;#x2F;kamp.pdf&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>VPS Compare – compare worldwide VPS servers</title><url>http://vpscomp.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rsync</author><text>This is the story of the VPS and how it came to be:&lt;p&gt;In August of 2001 I was flying from Denver to San Diego to do some contract datacenter work.&lt;p&gt;I had a Toshiba Libretto 110CT that was running FreeBSD and I was trying to troubleshoot an OS config issue, so I tried jail.  It gave me a complete, new FreeBSD system inside of a directory.&lt;p&gt;Then a lightbulb went on ...&lt;p&gt;A month later I posted beta invites to the cDc and 303 mailing lists and in December &amp;quot;JohnCompanies&amp;quot; was born.  I advertised almost solely on kuro5hin.org and grew the company from my apartment in Aspen, Colorado.  In February, 2004, I sold the company.&lt;p&gt;We called them &amp;quot;server instances&amp;quot;, but &amp;quot;VPS&amp;quot; is the name that eventually caught on.&lt;p&gt;JohnCompanies still lives on today.  Not sure where they&amp;#x27;d fit on the &amp;quot;VPS Compare&amp;quot; list.  I see our ad is still up on kuro5hin, if only because Rusty is too lazy to remove it, after more than 10 years...&lt;p&gt;The backup system(s) that we built for JohnCompanies customers was reworked and launched as a standalone product in 2006.  You know it as &amp;quot;rsync.net&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nikcub</author><text>I signed up in late 2001 iirc, one of those few rare moments when you see a new technology and you know nothing will be the same ever again.</text></comment>