once i left my full time job in februrary 06,  i spent all of march and april creating a ruby on rails front-end to the appropriation, billing, and management of XEN virtual machines. by june i had two boxes with the capacity of 15 low-ram users or 8 high-ram users per box at $25 and $40/month respectively on 100mbit colo. the beauty part was that i started with one anchor tenant who i charged a little differently and it covered all the operational costs. any customers beyond that was profit. the problem was i mustered up only two customers. after reaching critical functionality in two months with nothing but pride and credit card debt to show for it, i lost interest in the site.

it was a chicken and egg problem.  i needed more positive feedback in terms of new customers in order to feel it was justified to invest another month or two. the site needed more polish to where it would be really attractive and take on the competition in functionality, performance, and price. june and july were sort of lost months and by august i was back in the coder-for-hire, contracting mode. gridcolo was on the back burner, running itself but going nowhere. in december i got a new fulltime gig that im very happy with so it felt time to turn off gridcolo. and so i did. goodbye gridcolo.