Who is I/O FLOOD?

Hi, Gabriel Ramuglia here, President of I/O FLOOD, signing on for our first company blog post. I think it’s appropriate for our first post to help you get to know us, why we do what we do, who we are. In fact, that’s one of the two main purposes of this blog. Job one is to inform, giving you valuable information on hosting and technology. If we manage to entertain you along the way, that’s great too. Our second goal is to help you get to know us, what we do, and more importantly, why we do it. Our intention is for every blog post to focus on those two areas.

Today’s blog post is going to be a little theoretical, talking about ideals, and leaving you with questions along the way. Questions like “Do they mean what they say?”, and “That sounds great, but how do they put that into practice?”. To answer those questions, our future blog posts will give you examples of how we put into practice what we believe, while at the same time teaching you about technology and hosting. For today though, we’re going to talk theory.

So why does I/O FLOOD do what it does?

This is a question I’ve given a lot of thought to. It started out as a vague feeling. A feeling that other companies just weren’t doing things “right”, that there had to be a better way. Over time I’ve been able to better articulate what I mean when I say that, and we’re now ready to share it with you.

I/O FLOOD, at it’s core, exists to help entrepreneurs start and grow successful small businesses. We do this by championing the use of the best tools for the job, by treating people fairly, by providing high impact help, and by making sure that all of our rules serve a purpose. We just happen to rent servers.

Let’s go over each part individually, first, starting with our passion for entrepreneurship, going on to how that influences how we do business, and finishing with why we’ve chosen to focus our efforts on dedicated server rentals.

A passion for entrepreneurs

Whether you’re a potential customer, employee, or investor, we have a simple test to see how well you’d fit in at I/O FLOOD:

Are you the kind of person who sees possibility where nothing currently exists? Have you always been told that you have “too much time on your hands” as you work on your own ideas instead of doing what you’re expected to do? Are you the kind of person with an intense curiosity, never accepting the status quo until you’ve had a chance to decide for yourself? If so, then I/O FLOOD is for you.

It’s this entrepreneurial spirit that we believe in the most. Most people don’t understand us, and few will encourage us. Far too often, we’re on our own out there. This company was made for you.

How does I/O FLOOD do business?

We have four key principles that we put into action every day to achieve our mission of helping entrepreneurs start and grow successful small businesses. Quite simply, we champion the use of the best tools for the job, we treat people fairly, we provide high impact help, and we make sure that all of our rules serve a purpose. Let’s go over each of those individually:

We champion the use of the best tools for the job.

The best tools for the job are ones that:

• Solve the actual problem you are having
• Give excellent bang for the buck
• Are low maintenance and reliable
• Are easy to set up and get working

Big businesses can get away with choosing expensive, high maintenance solutions that barely work, but small businesses can’t afford that luxury. A middle manager may be ok with selecting a solution based on what is least likely to get them fired, but an entrepreneur needs a solution that really solves their problems and improves their bottom line.

If technology can’t meet these four criteria, it doesn’t belong at I/O FLOOD.

We believe in treating people fairly.

This one was is so obvious that it actually is meaningless unless you define it. We’ve chosen to define treating people fairly to mean:

• Caring about people’s problems, and doing what we can to help
• Building trust. Customers, employees, and investors are honestly told what to expect from us and what not to expect, and we do our best to live up to those expectations.
• Always working to improve the value we provide to our customers, wages we pay our employees, and return on investment earned by our investors, by steadily increasing efficiency.

I/O FLOOD believes that if we can’t profitably conduct business while abiding these principles, we shouldn’t be in business at all.

We believe in providing high-impact help.

At I/O FLOOD, we want to help where we can. We don’t want to leave you out in the cold, and we care about your problems. At the same time, we strive to give great bang for the buck, and therefore simply don’t have the resources to help with every conceivable problem. Because of these conflicting goals, we have to have a laser focus on making our efforts to help have the greatest impact possible.

Providing high impact help requires that we recognize our strengths and our weaknesses, and focus our efforts where they can help people the most. This means turning away customers and avoiding opportunities that are not a good fit for us. This also means helping people whenever we are well equipped to do so, even if that help doesn’t fit neatly into what would normally be expected of a hosting provider.

We believe that all rules should have a purpose.

If you’re like me, you hate arbitrary rules. You hate doing things just because they’ve always been done that way. Even more frustrating are rules that have a purpose, but the rule no longer suits the purpose it was created for. At the same time, a world without rules is a world where positive outcomes only happen out of sheer chance. We felt there had to be a better way. This is why we have a 4 step process for creating and evaluating any potential rule or rule change:

• Write down the goal that a rule intends to achieve
• Judge the value of our rules based on their ability to achieve their stated goals
• Judge the goal of a rule by checking that goals consistency with our core values
• Continually improve ourselves by using this structure of rules, goals, and values

If we can stick to these 4 guidelines whenever possible, we stand a good shot at eliminating the injustice and inefficiency of rules that don’t serve the purpose they were created for, rules that serve no purpose at all, or rules that serve a purpose contrary to what is right and fair.

Why rent servers?

The people who started I/O FLOOD started out running websites. As these websites grew, they began to require more servers as well as smarter ways to use those servers. Over time we developed better skills at managing servers and picking the right parts to get the job done. Eventually, we found ourselves having more fun running the servers than running websites, so it was only natural to put our talents to where they could be of the most use. Put simply, we love servers!

But why rent servers? Why not rent VPS’s, or run some really large websites, or do shared hosting, start a CDN, or something with “cloud”? All of those things need a lot of servers too right? In fact, we’ve worked on most of those things, and as it turned out, renting servers simply made the most sense for us and for our customers. After trying out a lot of different things and learning quite a bit along the way, between what we’re good at, what we love, and the realities of the marketplace, renting servers is currently our best opportunity for advancing the cause of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs wanted

So there you have it. You’ve read why I/O FLOOD does what it does, how we do it, and what we do. If you’re the kind of person who believes in entrepreneurship, creating something from nothing, and deciding for yourself what is and isn’t possible, I/O FLOOD is your company. We know that we won’t ever be perfect, we’ll never quite “get there”, but by knowing the direction we’re heading in, and why we’re trying to get there, we just might get close. Whether you’re a potential customer, employee, or investor, we’d love to work with you in making this dream a reality.

-Gabriel Ramuglia
President, Input Output Flood, LLC