Customer Story – Sezer Yaşar, Founder, Upmotion OÜ (Tallinn, Estonia)
Sezer Yaşar has a rule for infrastructure. It’s simple enough to fit in one sentence.
Own the part of the load you can predict. Rent the part you can’t.
Ten years in performance marketing taught him to think in levers: what drives output, what drives cost, and how to keep the two in proportion. Running businesses out of Tallinn taught him to keep things lean. The rule is where those two things meet.
What Upmotion actually runs
Under the Upmotion umbrella, Sezer operates two infrastructure businesses: web hosting, and a remote desktop service for business clients. The remote desktop product is the more interesting one. Each client gets a full virtual desktop – a dedicated machine with guaranteed resources – that they log into from anywhere. No shared resources, no noisy neighbours.
Both businesses run on a hybrid setup. Sezer owns and colocates hardware in Estonia – that’s the predictable base, the steady load he can size in advance. Everything that needs to grow or shrink with demand runs on Contabo. Backups tie the whole thing together, copied offsite to a separate location.
The split isn’t arbitrary. Colocated hardware is a fixed cost he can budget for in advance. Contabo VDS instances he can spin up or drop as his customer count changes, so the total bill scales with the business, not against it.
The elasticity problem
On paper, one large dedicated server sliced up with a hypervisor is cheaper. Sezer knows that. He runs Proxmox on his own hardware and understands it well, but he deliberately doesn’t do it for anything where demand moves.
The reason is churn. A client might take 30 desktops today and drop 10 next month. Hosting customers come and go. With owned hardware, you have to guess the right size in advance. Guess low and you’re scrambling for capacity. Guess high and you’re paying for idle resources and trying to resell from a position of weakness.
“With VDS, my costs follow my customers. When demand drops, my bill drops with it. When it grows, I add capacity in minutes instead of ordering hardware. I never have to bet on a customer staying to make the numbers work.”
That’s the logic behind the hybrid. The colocated hardware handles the load Sezer can predict. Contabo handles everything else.
The backup server: a different kind of logic
Backups are the opposite problem. The data only grows and the load is steady. There’s nothing elastic about it, which is exactly why a Dedicated Server makes sense there. Most storage for the money, month after month.
It also sits in a different data center, in a different country from the hardware it protects. That’s the biggest benefit. If something goes badly wrong at home, the copy is somewhere else entirely.
How Sezer found Contabo – and why he stayed
He found Contabo years ago on a Turkish webmaster forum. People there recommended it for competitive prices. He tried a single server to see if it held up.
It did. He never really looked elsewhere after that and has been with us for 7 years.
What kept him was reliability and an API good enough to build whole businesses on top of without needing a person on either side. To quote him: “Once a system like that works, there’s no real reason to move it.”
When support is needed, it’s there. “Support has helped every time I’ve needed them, and fast. That speed is part of the elasticity I described earlier.” Above that sits the Key Customer team – which Sezer describes as something closer to insurance. “If a ticket needs acceleration or a special situation comes up, they step in before I even ask. Whether it’s a problem that needs solving or an order that has to be delivered faster than usual, they pick it up and get it done quickly.”
The API is the product
For the remote desktop business, Contabo’s API isn’t a convenience – it’s the operation.
When an order comes in, Sezer’s system calls the API, provisions the machine, and delivers access details to the client – all without anyone needing to get involved. One support person handles the edge cases. Everything else runs itself.
That level of automation is what makes it possible to run an infrastructure business without it consuming your life. Sezer measures the value not in euros saved, but in attention freed.
“Running my own virtualisation layer for everything that scales would mean capacity planning, hypervisor updates, hardware failures and maintenance windows across far more machines. That’s a part-time job that never ends. Not having that job is what lets these businesses run while taking very little of my time.”
What’s next
The infrastructure businesses aren’t going anywhere – they’re the engine. But most of Sezer’s energy now goes into NEO, a design studio he’s built for companies that need a strong creative team without hiring one in-house. The hosting and remote desktop businesses fund it, quietly, in the background.
More growth on the infrastructure side, yes. But automated, quiet, out of the way.
“Contabo is the part of my business that runs itself. That’s exactly what I pay for.”
If you’re building something that needs to scale without turning into a second job, take a look at our VPS, VDS and Dedicated Server plans – and find out more about what Upmotion offers at upmo.com.
Want to be featured? We’re always looking for customers doing interesting things on Contabo infrastructure. Get in touch.
