Podworks

I was doing some free lance web designing since 1998. In those days, web designing needed very little. Just some basic knowledge about tagging n all. People would give you text, you just need to open it on a notepad, tag it properly n save it as a .html and send it back to the clients. For this job i got paid about Rs 1000 per page, and a page would take abotu an hour or 2 to finish. 1 page a day, thirty thousand bucks a month, was a rich man in college.

Later on in about 2001, the rates began to come down, thanks to html tutorials available widely on the net, and to the training centers opened in every corner, so upto about 2006 I had to work more with lower rates. Parallely I was doing some hosting too. It was on 2006 that i decided to start an exclusive Web Hosting Company, and when I was pondering about for a good name, the name IndyaHozting came to my mind, and I went straight ahead and registered the domain.

Got the domain, designed the site and uploaded the site and was sitting before the computer n was waiting for an email or any indication of an order. Nothing happened for a week. Thats when I remembered someone quite some time back had given me an AdSense script to be included with his forums, a banner of text and image ads would appear below every post on his ‘phorum’ as he called it. Naturally I landed up at adwords.google.com

I didnt have a credit card at that time, so I got an Easy Deposit Card from ICICI Bank, and went ahead with it. Thankfully, every click paid for itself, and i was doing some business. I was selling 10MB Windows for Rs 400 and 10MB Linux for Rs 300. You wouldn’t believe me after seeing the rates on my site now.

Thats when some one had told me about increasing business volumes rather than having high profit. So I started crashing prices gradually, and started introducing bigger packages like 50GB, 100 GB etc.

I got a Paypal gateway, where all the money started landing, and I invested all the money on colocating servers in a reputed Datacentre in the US, which helped me in still crashing the prices further.

Making all these sales was pretty exciting, working from 6 am to 3 am continuously, with only 3 hours to sleep, without much time for the family and always on the phone. But the money never came to my hands, they all got invested on servers, and for the local expenses here, I had to raise money locally. I needed an Indian Payment Gateway, and they never give payment gateways to a 1 man office run from home. Had to look for an office.

After looking about for a week, I found an office, near the Bus Stand, on the 3rd floor. A really isolated place in the middle of the city. I loved working from there. I still love that place, and regret that i had to move away from there when the number of staff in my office increased.

Got an Airtel Broad Band connection there, with 256 Kbps bandwidth, and used to download all software and movies I or any of my friends needed at night, and worked during the day.

I have made a reseller base of over 5000 people, and most of these clients of mine are very good friends, and I stay constantly in touch with them thru chat. They dont see me as a service provider and I dont see them as clients. We are primarily friends, and a community, where everyone knows everyone.

Indyahozting is just like an anthill before Mt. Everest, but I am happy to own this company.