Overview
My name is Paul Kelly, I am the technical director of a fast growing hosting company in Ireland. I oversee our support department and plan new implamentations to customer specs.
My History
I grew up in a small town in Ireland on the river barrow called Graiguenamanagh, the irish language spelling is “graíg na manach”, the literal translation of this is village of the monks. The town is famous for a variety of things. Namely Duiske Abbey, this abbey was built 800 years ago by Cistercian monks. It has stood for this length of time which is a testament to the building methods the monks had. It was refurbished in the 1980s and today stands as one of the best tourist attractions in the south east.
I spent most of my life living in the town. In 1995 we moved house just outside the town where we had built a beautiful 5 bedroomed house on 4 acres. My parents had originally planned to do B&B but they got lazy and never bothered. Both of them are retired now and basically, walk, play golf, go places, garden and other various activities.
I completed my secondary schooling in Good Counsel College (GCC) in New Ross, Co. wexford. I spent 5 years there and commuted daily on a bus with whom I regard as my best friends today. From here I went to It Carlow and completed a course in computer networking.
In 2003 I started working for Deycom as tech support and web development. While in Deycom I worked on Blacknight with Michele while he was still in Italy. We started small with a couple of servers and built on our shared hosting offerings.
My company! 
In August 2002 I got talking to a guy on Irc as a result of the Open mailing list. He had 2 servers from another hosting company but he was no sysadmin. I had a fairly good sysadmin back ground so we got talking and I took at a look at his servers. He didn’t give me “root” access, but a simple user account. I did a quick google and found an exploit and had root on his main web hosting box in under a minute. Fun. From here on in, I mostly looked after the day to day running of the boxes. Michele was in Italy working for a company that translated technical documents and was mainly on site with customers such as Microsoft and the like. We basically formed a partnership there and then, opened a bank account etc.
On may 8th 2003, Blacknight Internet Solutions ltd was formed. Both Michele and I are 50% owners of the company. He arrived back in Ireland in august 2003 to work full time for blacknight. In late 2003 we went direct with Data Electronics Group where we took cabinet space and IP transit services. After this we started to build on our Co-location offerings and Dedicated servers.
We moved into Redbus in amsterdam in late 2004 where we offer high bandwidth, cost effective colo and dedicated servers. This move gave us better access to the european market. It also gave us huge connectivity and low latency round trips to all european countries. At the moment we can offer a p4 based server with 500Gb of traffic a month for less than 150 euro a month.
In 2005 we have grown exponetially, from approx 18th in the country to the sixth largest hosting company. In the new year we will be rolling out our own multihomed fully cisco powered network. We’ll basically have a pair of cisco routers, several levels of routers, core/distribution and customer access switches. We’ll also be joining INEX which will enable us to peer with the other memebers of INEX. This will allow us to deliver our customers content to our irish customers quicker than ever before.