Our Story: Chmuranet

This is sort of our coming out party, hoping you’ll welcome us, Chmuranet.com

Chmuranet is a Seedbox company, which has been planned since last fall and formed at the tail end of last year, when we started building our own machines for co-location. Our first machines went up in January. We chose the cheapest bandwidth we could find CEU Servers in, don’t laugh, Zlin, Czech Republic with 1Gbit unmetered at under $300 USD/month. It did not last long, the peering was abysmal, had nowhere near the speeds we expected or needed, and it turned out they are actually a satellite branch of FDC Servers in Chicago, a largely absent landlord.

I do have to give them credit, they have absolutely amazing local 7x24 technical support, effecting quick repair of our inaugural server’s smashed SATA backplane which had been mangled in shipping (a bent and crumpled SuperMicro 2U steel chassis?!? Gorillas were suspected). Every ticket, every addition, had an initial response of less than 10 minutes. The same cannot be said for the network administration out of Chicago, which was aloof, slow to respond and dismissive of our well documented problems, like a trace route longer than my arm …to Vienna.

We needed a new data center, STAT! Hopefully a hungry partner who was also highly competent…

But let me back up, what could possibly be compelling about starting a seedbox business? It is a crowded market, pitted with possible legal hazards, all with razor thin margins.

It started with sort of a confluence of things, I had finished a series of articles on building a cheap DIY Fibre Channel SAN capable of over 50 terabytes of storage, and saw because of the market, that enterprise grade, highly tuned Linux servers could be built for a song. At the same time a friend was going through support hell with his seedbox vendor, a profitable firm, with the customer relations skills of a borer beetle, and little respect for the customers that buttered their bread. A third friend had experience helping run a then defunct sharing site for film buffs – helping spread movies the film industry had forgotten, or saw no profit in. He knew our customers. And finally the American government, with SOPA and PIPA, jumped in as an eager partner in expanding the seedbox market.

We also saw that the seedbox industry, if you can call it that, had not embraced a key advantage of the business, it could offer people privacy and anonymity, both in short supply in today’s landscape.

So we had the skills to build and provision the servers, no cast-off retired white boxes for us. We understood the P2P market, and had a handle on the Seedbox industry – and more importantly we are neither greedy opportunists, nor kids. We saw a better way to make a widget, and thought we were the folks to do it.

A plan was hatched, we would build a seedbox service, make anonymity a keystone, provide the support we couldn’t find anyplace else, all in one premium service: Offering each user, each member, a virtual private server with its own honking hard drive. Give each machine an unmetered 1Gbps pipe, put as few as possible limitation on the service as possible (see our irreverent TOS) , tune and tweak the living crap out of the service so it sang, all at the best possible price.


So we needed a new hosting firm, we had failed in the Czech Republic…

Given a few false starts, and through a rather circuitous route, we landed at YISP.nl, where we found the essential speeds and network support we had to have. We also found a firm that treated us as valued customers, a partner in getting us to be a healthy growing biz. They have really worked out for us.

So three months ago we started taking in members, few here, a few there, from small pool, offering a discount – we had all the pieces in place, we had been up and running, since January, but it hadn’t been road tested, stressed in any fashion. We spent the time with little sleep, as one of us says, beating it to fit, painting it to color. We tuned the VM, we backported a kernel here, we tweaked virtual memory allocation there, we compiled, and recompiled each application. Once the users were happy, we added to the infrastructure, often taking their advice. We ported a support ticket system, linked in Live Help, wrote an FAQ, and brought up a Forum.

We still have a ways to go, and have plans for expanded administration capabilities, but we are ready to go wide. This is that.

We hope, if interested, you find it a pleasure also, like a kid with his first car, we are eager to have you take it for a spin.

If it hasn't been buried yet, you can find our advert over in the advertising section.