About Us

Our History

By early 2010, Hani (the founder of servaRICA) was working on a website project that was supposed to be called postaRICA. When that project code reached maturity, we started looking for a hosting provider to host our new project. We were disappointed because we couldn’t find a fully Canadian-owned and -operated host that was inexpensive (the few options one the market were all expensive), and since the project was server intensive, we had to find a solution

Instead of working with a host, we decided to buy the hardware, co-locate it, and use it to run our application. At the time, that solution was significantly cheaper than renting servers from a purely Canadian host

With co-location, you pay for electricity and space, so it made sense to go with the biggest server we could get our hands on—no matter how beefy the server, you pay the same. So, we got our first server, which was an AMD Opteron server with 24 cores and 128GB of ram (this was considered a very big server back then)

It became clear that the project we bought the server for, postaRICA, wasn’t ready for market. That shifted our attention to providing our solution to other companies who were looking for an affordable Canadian host. This is when we decided to start a web hosting company, and servaRICA was born

Why we named it ServaRICA

We chose servaRICA during a brainstorming session where we were looking for a name that is musical and related to the field of web hosting.

So, postaRICA became ServaRICA

The automation issue

Before we start selling our web hosting services, we had to solve the issue of automation. We needed to keep everything automated as much as possible in order to decrease the need for manual labour.

Some modules and tools for automating the VM lifecycle were available, but most of them were either not secure or too restrictive, so we decided to build our own automation software. Our first step was to buy a small company that had usable software. Their code was very bad but did the job. Within two months, we had completely rewritten the code to acceptable standards. This first module was working with Xen OSS. Although the software was a commercial module when we bought the company, we didn’t sell a lot of it (this module became legacy after we developed Xenica for XenServer)

Xenica was born

Our company started to grow, and it became clear that Xen OSS is too open, and that you need a lot of automation to make it work. We needed something with a more stable API, so we moved to XenServer. This was a huge success, and we decided to rewrite the Xen OSS module to work with XenServer. That’s how Xenica was born

Expansions

servaRICA has gone through multiple expansions, from having a single server to having multiple servers (each with 256GB ram) to having multiple server racks. We began utilizing our uplink provider network completely, and with time we had our own routers and our own ASN, and we started to have multiple carriers