A few days ago Katharina gave you a detailed overview about the history of Contabo in her blog post “Contabo through the ages! The story so far…”.
Based on the mentioned most important milestones of the past 10 years we are going to publish now and within the next few days some pictures, photos and texts which we have been collecting during the last years.
Let’s have a look again on the chronicle posted by Katharina…
…and let’s go back to the very beginning when we put our first own rack server into operation at our first data center location in “Mainhattan”, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
In 2004 the first machines went online in the commonly known “Redbus Interhouse” at Lyoner Straße 28. At the beginning we just started with a space for 10 (or 15?) servers, but soon, our company had been growing fast, and thus, also the number of servers in our data center.
Not only we have been delighted about our rapid growth, but also our IT service provider who has been responsible for the handling of our hardware on site and who we worked with for more than 4 years, until we left Frankfurt am Main a little bit later.
Within a few months our server farm grew from 10 servers to 100 servers, and until today our business is expanding at an ever-increasing rate.
A few months later our long-term IT service provider decided to open another data center location a few houses away from us in Lyoner Straße 15. It was probably not only our very positive development which was responsible for their new data center, but we certainly have made an important contribution to that. At this time Giga-Hosting/ Contabo occupied the highest numbers of servers in their data center.
Today, 10 years later, the Tier1 carrier and global player “Cogent” has settled down right there, in the same datacenter we had used for many years at that time, with his German headquarter.
In the following you will find some impressions of our time (2004-2008) in Frankfurt am Main:
Our objective has always been to stay responsible for all of our servers. This means, we have chosen all single items and the infrastructure of our servers on our own and ,according to our ideas, we created server systems which were ready-to-use. We worked day and night to deliver our servers to Frankfurt am Main as soon as possible. And believe me, this was really hard work.
The following picture shows our already packaged servers shortly before its transportation to Frankfurt. According to the file attributes the picture was taken in October 2005 at 2:00 AM in the morning.
Giga-Hosting staff often travelled to Frankfurt to support the technicians there. I can warmly recommend “Motel 1” as accommodation because that’s where the team stayed during our visit and it was pretty nice.
It was situated between the airport and the data center and that’s why we haven’t seen a lot of the city during our stay.
This was the view out of our hotel room – we had to be content with a view towards another hotel instead of impressive pictures of the city centre and the famous Frankfurt skyline:
While we have been focused on the hardware and on the infrastructure of our servers, we took care of one of our most important matters: our product range.
When we started planning our company we agreed on three basic principles which focused on our customers and that have been applied consistently and uncompromisingly to this very day:
1) Discount prices
2) Instant service
3) The customer is king
According to these principles we operated day by day.
We were working hard to continually improve our products like webspace, servers, colocation, domains and its sustainable development. From time to time we offered radical price reductions but always together with high quality products and support.
This concept has been proven for years and it is still our company philosophy.
In the following you will find some impressions of some former marketing promotions and offers:
In March 2006 we opened the first office in Munich for our 1st and 2nd level support department. Since that time our team has been growing constantly.
If you are interested in more details about our history, stay tuned here on our blog. The story will be continued…