... let's turn to a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent sub­jec­t.

In my pro­fes­sion­al life (that is, not count­ing odd job­s) I have had on­ly three em­ploy­er­s.

I worked for many years for the nice guys at UNL and for about a year for the not so nice guys at Conec­ti­va (now Man­dri­va) Ok, I take that back, they were nice guys, they just were not a good place to work at. Or rather to stop work­ing at.

And the third one has been me.

I must say I am pret­ty hap­py with me as a boss. I have man­aged to go through some very dif­fi­cult mo­ments in my coun­try's econ­o­my, and nev­er failed to cov­er pay­rol­l. Then again, I was very will­ing to take some pay­cut­s, so I am a mod­el em­ploy­ee, at least about that.

But... I have de­cid­ed, a few months ago, that there are clear lim­its on how far be­ing one's boss and sole em­ploy­ee can take you, so with a cou­ple of friends we have de­cid­ed to start a com­pa­ny, sortof.

It's pret­ty ten­ta­tive right now, but we are all three quite knowl­edge­able in many things, and our ar­eas of ex­per­tise over­lap enough so that we can cov­er each oth­er, and are dif­fer­ent enough that we have a var­ied ser­vice of­fer.

Our main fo­cus is sys­tem/net­work/DB man­age­men­t, and a lit­tle cod­ing. So from now on, you will see ev­ery now and then, up­dates about this new projec­t.

Where are we now:

• We have a few cus­­tomer­s.

• Each of us is keep­­ing most of their old ones, too.

• We are us­ing Trac to man­age is­­sues like tick­­et­ing and doc­u­­men­­ta­­tion.

What we need to do:

• We need to start mar­ket­ing.

Any­one can rec­om­mend a good nerdy host­ing? Un­man­aged, cheap, Lin­ux? We are go­ing right now with Tek­ton­ic, which has some very cheap un­man­aged plan­s.

Any­one can rec­om­mend good lit­er­a­ture on how to man­age a ser­vice com­pa­ny?

Any­one thinks this is a very bad idea? Or a very good idea? Why?

I am pret­ty psyched about this, these are the two per­sons I would trust most in this sub­jec­t, and we have been friends for a very long time. It's go­ing to be fun :-)