I started PlantSix some time in 2002 when I was working at InfoSpace and very bored. These were the days before Xen, when if you had to pay several hundred dollars a month for real dedicated hardware if you wanted root. I figured we could spread the cost, I'd buy a 1U server, ship it to California and get it collocated. I signed up a few people I knew, and we got it going with some handy paypal subscriptions to help cover my costs.
Hurricane Electric had a pretty decent colo deal (at least for the time) letting me put in just a single 1U server. I picked up a Supermicro 1U server with 1GB of RAM, 2 120GB SATA drives, and a 2.4Ghz P4. I loaded up FreeBSD 4.8 or something from that era, and mirrored the disks with Vinum. It's ran without a hitch for 5 years. Running PHP, Java, perl, and even Rails apps later on.
In the end I got sick of making sure I was getting payed, too lazy to do any tech support, and with my new job, just too busy to deal. So I moved my own stuff to Slicehost and let everyone know they should start looking elsewhere.
Today I ended a 2.6 year uptime. The server will be packed and shipped back to me, so it can live in a closet, powered off.
