About
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing more to add,
but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
We love making things simple, elegant and easy to use. We believe that powerful web hosting tools, even if complex behind the scenes, should expose only simplicity, beauty and power.
These tools should be available as an open source projects, so you could use them either hosted already for your convenience or install them on your own server, or even on your laptop, for testing purposes. No barriers, no secrets, no vendor lock-in. Did we mention no complexity?
You should be able to run professional small hosting business or simply manage your own sites without hiring developer and sysadmin, unless you need something really custom. The web hosting management should be as simple as using your mobile phone.
It should be also powerful under the hood, providing highest possible performance out of the box, without hiring expensive consulting service from performance/tuning gurus. There is nothing wrong with gurus, and they are still helpful with large projects, but you should be able to live also without them.
Of course proper configuration and following best practices on the CMS App level are still important, but all the rest under the hood should just work, out of the box.
One day we will be there, but we already have made a good progress over the last three years, thanks to many years of previous experience in the industry.
We started our first web hosting business as an Adgrafix resellers in 1997. Adgrafix developed probably the first in the world, user friendly control panel, to make managing web sites easy for the average Joe.
In 1998 we developed our own control panel, written in Perl, which has been used in production until 2005 by many small hosting businesses and resellers – long before many other now popular control panels emerged.
In 2007 we started our Drupal adventure, and after two years we discovered something really, really exciting, named after the god of the oceans in Norse mythology – Ægir.
There was already one hosting company running early version of Aegir in production – Bryght, acquired by Raincity Studios, but they closed the doors in April 2009.
The Aegir project was still actively developed thanks to brilliant folks at Development Seed, with the project founder Adrian Rossouw and Antoine Beaupré from the Koumbit team, and we decided to jump in to help re-introduce Aegir hosted service on the market, and this is how our Omega8.cc hosting start-up was born in the summer of 2009.
When we started using Aegir, installing the system was an incredibly complicated process with many steps both on command line and in the web based install wizard. It was later greatly improved thanks to innovations introduced by the Aegir core developer Miguel Jacq, so today you can install Aegir very easily, on command line exclusively, but even with all those improvements, installing the system and initial configuration steps required to add 21 currently supported Drupal platforms and distributions were still too hard, so we decided to make it simple for everyone.
This is how our dual-core, open source installer, Barracuda & Octopus was born. It is a simplified version of our own scripts we are using to create and upgrade Aegir hosted instances in the high performance environment we have built.
We support open source, we share our work and we help others for free, so they will be able to clone our hosting business and make Aegir the de facto standard in Drupal hosting.
Are you ready to join this exciting journey?