About us

Our history

By early 2010, Hani (the founder of ServaRICA) was working on a website project that was supposed to be called postaRICA. When that project's code reached maturity, we started looking for a hosting provider for it — and were disappointed that we couldn't find a fully Canadian-owned and -operated host that was also inexpensive. Since the project was server-intensive, we had to find a solution.

Instead of working with a host, we decided to buy the hardware, co-locate it, and use it to run our application. At the time that was significantly cheaper than renting servers from a purely Canadian host. With co-location you pay for electricity and space, so it made sense to go with the biggest server we could get — our first was an AMD Opteron with 24 cores and 128GB of RAM, considered a very big server back then.

It became clear that postaRICA wasn't ready for market. That shifted our attention to providing our solution to other companies looking for an affordable Canadian host — and ServaRICA was born.

Why we named it ServaRICA

We chose ServaRICA during a brainstorming session for a name that was musical and related to web hosting. So postaRICA became ServaRICA.

The automation issue

Before selling our hosting services, we had to solve automation — keeping everything as automated as possible to reduce manual labour. Existing modules were either insecure or too restrictive, so we built our own. We started by acquiring a small company with usable (if rough) software, and rewrote its code to acceptable standards within two months. That first module worked with Xen OSS and later became legacy once we developed Xenica for XenServer.

Xenica was born

As we grew, it became clear Xen OSS was too open and needed heavy automation. We wanted a more stable API, so we moved to XenServer and rewrote the module to work with it. That was a huge success — and that's how Xenica was born.

Expansions

ServaRICA has gone through multiple expansions — from a single server to many (each with 256GB RAM) to multiple server racks. We began fully utilizing our uplink provider's network and, over time, built our own routers, obtained our own ASN, and added multiple carriers.

Meet our team