Call for ‘startups start here’ stories


For the last 9 years we have been helping start ups launch and run their services.  It is great to have a job where we get to help customers onto their path to Internet fame and glory.

We are now looking to tell the stories of some of these start ups.  If you have bootstrapped a new site with us we would love to feature you in a post.

This would be a great way to promote your site.  And we think it will make a good resource to help others see some of the challenges your faced (with your product, business and technical) and how you overcame them.  We will give a $100 credit for every published story.

If you are interested, post a bit about your business here.  Or contact us directly via email.  We will select a few stories to tell and conduct a simple email interview with you.Photo credit: Dene’ Miles


3 responses to “Call for ‘startups start here’ stories”

  1. I started Loanables.com about 6 years ago, and picked RimuHosting due to your early support for Rails and the customer service that customers raved about. Man, have you lived up to that! You’ve really been an extension of our team. We can handle the coding of the site — a peer-to-peer rental network — but we don’t have great sysadmin skills, and couldn’t afford to hire a sysadmin. Thanks to your stellar support, I haven’t had to hire one, and it is incredibly comforting to know that I have your support team standing behind us. Anytime we have an issue — urgent or not — you’re a simple support ticket away.

    You are also amazingly competitive on pricing, which has allowed us to grow and handle traffic spikes. We’ve had a few occasions when major news sites like CNN and Good Morning America did stories on Loanables, and with help from your support team, we were able to handle the extra traffic (10x our usual) gracefully. I particularly like your self-service tools, that even me you move an entire server to a different machine with a single click.

    RimuHosting clearly take PRIDE in their work, and I can only imagine that it’s a great place to work, because that’s how you get employees who provide such great customer service. Thank you, Rimu team, for being so great to work with.

    Lots of startups use those other/bigger companies for “elastic” hosting, but I don’t understand why. Rimu is less expensive and provides incredible customer service and tech support.

    P.S. If you decide to publish this story, please keep the $100. I owe you at least that for all those support tickets you haven’t charged me for. :-)

  2. Yanomo.com is a social time tracker, which means we use time tracking as a vehicle for in-company social updates. Since we’re a SaaS serving worldwide customers, our server performance was and is absolutely crucial.

    Enter Rimu. When we were building the (Java-based) application several years ago, we switched to Rimu as our hosting party after hearing good stuff about you… Specifically about your competence in Java-hosting… And since we have a weak spot for New Zealanders. :)

    So far, Rimu has been a true partner. You’ve saved us several times, as we’ve made the tricky transition from 1 user to thousands.

    If you want to feature us in a story, let us know. You can mail me directly to flesh it out.

  3. Rimu was recommended by a friend when we started Pond5.com a few years ago. At the same time AWS started so we split up the site in an AWS part (dealing with payloads and file transfers) and one end user web part. EC2/S3 latency has never been impressive.

    Rimu has been very cooperative in odd server demands from our part, keeping odd choice ssd:s in spare, local backbone network, custom choice hardware in some cases etc. It has almost been like having staff employed directly by us when it comes to flexibility.

    After the power outage in the Dallas Datacenter a year ago where Rimu rents space, we thought of having DC redundancy but it has not been as pleasant working with others so we’ve abandoned that path and trust it will take 6 years to the next power incident, where we’ll be ready with A/B redundancy on all servers + server redundancy.

    As a CTO, needing to get things done without powerpoint and smoke barriers, I like the straight down to the point answers I always receive from the Rimu staff. In a troublesome stressful situation this is priceless. No SLA blame game. In addition to this, the pricing is, I have discovered, very competitive.