LEB: You’re relatively new to the hosting world, starting operations in June of 2023. Why did you decide to get into this hyper-competitive market?

There’s always a need for new entrants to keep prices low and ensure good quality service. We’ve seen a consolidation wave with plenty of non-infrastructure companies dominating the market. Those companies end up competing with their own customers via their other lines of business. Our customers appreciate having a trustworthy partner whose interests are aligned with theirs.

LEB: What’s your team’s background?

We have experience at ISPs, a CDN, software-based startups, and even more traditional infrastructure companies like water and power utilities.

LEB: Nashville, TN is not a common location we see a lot. What are some advantages for customers there?

Nashville is indeed an underserved market, even though it’s one of the fastest growing economies and sits near the geographical center of US population. Some of our neighboring states are underserved too, providing a pretty good “catchment basin” for our customers.

It also benefits from cheap, renewable energy (thanks to the TVA) and low taxes–savings we’re able to pass on to our customers in the form of lower prices.

LEB: A lot of new providers through up SolusVM and start renting VMs, but it looks like you have a very advanced architecture with an API, load balancers, K8s as a service, object storage, etc. Is this all a solution you developed in-house or are you using a platform of some sort? I’m really impressed by the breadth of your service offerings. You look like a DigitalOcean.

Thanks. DigitalOcean has been very successful. One important feature they lack is fine-grained access management (what we and AWS refer to as IAM)–the ability to create access tokens that are only permitted to do a specific set of things–something that all of our products support. It’s an essential feature for protecting the security of an account’s resources. An example would be generating a token that can only perform operations on a single resource or a group of resources with a given tag. That way, a credential that’s accidentally published to a source code repository, for example, has a minimal blast radius.

All our products are built in-house. The secret is to compose the higher level products using the APIs of the lower level ones, something that provides critical leverage and also forces us to improve the extensibility and quality of the lower level ones. For example, we recently did a exercise to reduce the creation time of an instance to just a couple seconds, something that brought immediate benefit to our kubernetes product which is built on top of those instances.

Q: I didn’t see it on your web site, so I’ll ask here. What kind of uptime/SLA do you promise?

Good question–it’s buried in our terms and conditions page. We currently offer a 99.99% SLA for two of our core (and most popular) products: compute instances and object storage. We plan to offer SLAs for our other products, too.

Q: What’s on the horizon for Entrywan?

For the first quarter of this year, we hope to launch our first location in Europe and introduce some tools to self-manage instance image templates, a popular request!

Looks like a pretty neat startup.  Have you tried Entrywan?  What do you think?  Please let us know in the comments below!