Atrioxhosting Story
Heya, and welcome to the background story of Atrioxhosting. I’ll take you through the past and the origins of this company. Hold on tight, because it’s a long story!
SparksNetwork
Since January 17 2024, we have been officially open, but the company itself has been around for longer. Two years before the official release, we were already busy making plans for the company. You might wonder, where did it all begin?
It all started with my own Minecraft server called SparksNetwork. This is my own Minecraft server, and it existed even before Atrioxhosting was even planned. With SparksNetwork, my goal was to offer players enjoyment without them having to pay extra for it. The downside was that Minecraft servers were already quite expensive back then. SparksNetwork still exists to this day and can be played via play.sparksnetwork.net!
Syntexhosting
After looking at various hostings, I ended up with Syntexhosting, where I later also became an employee. Thanks to my contributions as an employee, I could get the servers at a cheaper rate and was able to keep SparksNetwork alive. Unfortunately, after working for this company for about a year, it became clear that the company was not doing well. I was in trouble and had to come up with something to keep SparksNetwork alive. It was time for a change..
Realization
I realized that SparksNetwork was a huge resource consumer. A few GB of RAM was no longer going to be enough. I started looking for options and ended up with my first dedicated server. This server had an Intel Xeon 1650v3 CPU, along with 128GB of DDR4 RAM and 2TB of HDD storage. It was far from the best, but it worked within my budget.
A friend of mine, also known as Itxchi, came to me because he was also at Syntexhosting. Now without a place, he asked me if he could also host the server on the same dedicated server. Since SparksNetwork didn't use 128GB of RAM, I was fine with them joining on my dedicated server. But it didn't stop at one friend; it became more and more.. That was the moment I decided that I found the prices of other hostings too high.
The beginning
Together with my friend Lucas, I came up with the idea to see what would happen if we started our own hosting. With my knowledge of hardware and Lucas knowledge of software, we were a good team. At that time, we didn't have a name, and everything just fell under the Minecraft server SparksNetwork. The first Discord channels were created in it to get everything on track. More and more people wanted to join, and the name began to spread quickly. From this point on, it was decided to create a first "Alpha" version of the hosting, but still without a name.
Together we started brainstorming about a name. I think we had dozens of names before he suddenly messaged me with "Atrioxhosting". I immediately approved it! And thus, the name Atrioxhosting was born. Lucas started working on the Atrioxhosting logo, which is still in use to this day. The logo was originally developed at a much lower resolution, and in some places, you can still find that mistake, but in most places, we now have a neat high-resolution logo.
From that same moment, I started focusing on the next steps for the hosting. I began designing things, researching to see what was possible. Since it was clear from this moment that we wanted to target the group with less money, it was difficult to find something suitable. I have spent months, if not years, working to deliver the best and achieve my goals. But I succeeded, and I’m proud of it. For those with less money, we offer servers starting at just €0.75/GiB per month and even for heavy users, we have great packages at low costs! But..
DDoS Mitigation
..We encountered one problem: Distributed-Denial-of-Service attack (DDoS) protection. Companies charge a fortune for this. Take Cloudflare, for instance, which charges €3500 per month, Voxility charges €1800 per month and Redware charges €1000 for 200 Mbit/s, while our servers use 1000 Mbit/s (1 Gbit/s) For each node! We eventually settled on Path protection, as most hosting providers used it. The reason? They are not as exorbitantly expensive as the previously mentioned providers.
However, after less than a year of use, it turned out that things were going dramatically wrong with Path. They had lost direct connections in Europe, which caused latency to become extremely unstable. So, we kept searching...
After weeks of searching, we found a reseller of Voxility, but with lower prices. This company was "AS203446". They used Voxility for pre-filtering DDoS attacks and then applied their own filters to stop the rest. We were happy with this setup. The latency was good, and we were protected against DDoS attacks. But this, too, came to an end. They eventually stopped using pre-filters, and their own filters were so poor that almost every DDoS attack got through. Time to move on, again..
And so the search continued.. I was really on the verge of giving up, when I received a tip about the company Templass. Spoiler, they were/are scammers. It turned out they had no good PoPs, protection was not provided, and the latency is insanely high. In total, we were scammed for €356 by this company. I was done with it and stopped Atriox altogether. My COO, Kylian R., did not want to give up immediately and kept the staff team together.
Knowing that I can’t really give up and will have to reach my goal, I kept searching.. I literally became physically and mentally ill from it. For days I couldn’t do anything but scour the internet looking for a solution for my company. And finally..
Skylink, a data center on the edge of the Netherlands and Germany, ensuring optimal latency for both the west and east. With direct connections via optic fiber to AMS-IX and DE-CIX with a capacity of 100 Gbit/s or more, the network is unmatched. This is achieved through direct T1 upstreams such as AS174 & AS6830. But also T2 providers like AS6204, AS5405 & AS9002, which each provide an additional capacity of 100 to 400 Gbit/s.
Together with Skylink, we have been able to make arrangements that now allow us to use Aurologic. Not just 1 Gbit/s, but up to 10 Gbit/s! Aurologic has 3.6 Tbit/s mitigation capacity, and through partners, dozens of additional Tbit/s mitigation capacity for volume attacks. The data center provides us with a control panel and API, giving us complete control over Aurologic's filters per IP address for optimal network protection. Both Layer 3/4 and Layer 7 are protected.
Atrioxhosting
The weeks, months, years of work have resulted in this amazing project. We offer both high-quality servers starting at €0.75/GiB per month and provide the most powerful hardware for the most intensive servers on the planet! And my promise to everyone is that we won’t stop and will keep improving to achieve our goal day by day.
Want to help us achieve our goal? Yes? Amazing! This can be done in several ways. It is possible to strengthen our team from within by applying for the staff team, or by establishing a Partnership with us. Don’t feel limited to this, every suggestion is welcome and can be discussed! We are grateful to everyone who wants to support our goal.
Atrioxhosting, premium services, without premium prices!
Thank you for reading the history and origins of Atrioxhosting. I hope I can also help you make your dreams come true!