$2.5M Infrastructure Financing

One of the things that’s limited us a little bit over time has been financing for equipment. Hosting businesses need capital.

We started in mid-2006 with a solid business plan and financial plan, and it has worked well.

We’ve raised prices twice as it became apparent that we had underestimated some costs, such as the costs of having excellent people around the world to support our customers.

Financing the growth of the infrastructure (hardware, software, etc) that directly runs our customers’ applications has been reasonably do-able, but not without difficulties. Most banks, leasing companies, and hardware vendors don’t want to work with a new business that’s building multi-hundred-thousand dollar clusters.

Of course, we did find financing solutions, and those made Cluster 2 possible. Cluster 2 got built, but it got built a few months later than we wanted, which meant there was a time when we had to turn away customers because we couldn’t meet their needs quickly.

I’m happy to say that those days are largely behind us, at least in our current market.

We’ve secured $2.5 million dollars of equipment capital, which we’re utilizing to answer our customers’ needs.

Cluster 3 is underway, as are 2 clusters for specific customers, plus clusters coming on the US East Coast and the UK in early 2008.

By early 2008, when a customer says they need a small dedicated cluster running in 7 days, it will be no problem :-)!