About Kättare

Kättare is dedicated to making Internet Hosting Services simple and affordable. We offer a variety of hosting services for individuals, businesses, web designers, and developers.

Kättare means...

A word of Swedish descent meaning "heretic." Since Kättare employs nearly 100% Linux and FreeBSD servers, and since right here in our own Pacific Northwest "backyard" is the headquarters for another OS vendor. (ahem... someone in Redmond?) We thought it appropriate that we be the heretics of the hosting world.

Our Beginnings

The machine known as Sphinx was brought to life in the spring of 1996. It was originally a Compaq Presario 520 running Windows with a 486 DX/2-66 processor. In those days a DX/2-66 was a useful piece of machinery but it didn't take long for the instability of Windows 95 to become annoying and Windows NT was out of reach, so Sphinx was introduced to the world of Slackware Linux. Back then Slackware was distributed as a group of 29 1.44 MB floppy images to be downloaded via FTP. It took us ages to download all of the images via 14.4k modem, copy them onto floppies, weed out the floppies with bad sectors, and get Linux installed. If I remember right, it was on the order of 2 weeks before we had everything installed, setup, and configured.

Almost immediately friends and co-workers with accounts on Sphinx recognized the merits of Linux. As a server, it was amazingly fast in comparison to Windows 95 and it seemed to run forever without needing to be rebooted. Our hard work was paying off.

As times changed and technology advanced Sphinx was slowly upgraded to maintain it's usefulness and keep up with the increasing number of users on it. Before we knew it Sphinx had over 200 users and was moving more than 10 gigs of web page and email data a day. So much data that we were wearing out our welcome (free connection) at Oregon State University.

We needed to find a new home for Sphinx, so I got together with long-time friend Ryan Boehm.(now a graphic design graduate from OSU.) We started talking about the number of users involved and the great services they were receiving. We went back and forth about the amount of money I had put into the hardware for Sphinx and the amount of time I spent maintaining it. After a detailed discussion it was decided that asking users for a couple dollars a month would help to maintain the services and would allow for improvements as well. (Even better that the improvements didn't have to come out of my pocket.) The more we discussed it the better it got so we decided to go into business doing Web Hosting. That was in the early fall of 1997. It has since grown to include other services including Domain Registration, Colocation, Dedicated Servers, Wireless Internet Access, and Software Development.

July 2007, Ten Years...

The original Sphinx has long been retired and many new machines (around 280 servers as of July 2007.) are the workhorses for Kättare Internet Services. We're not a massive hosting provider, and we like it this way. We get to know our clients, we do the best job we can for them, and the relationship is truly mutually beneficial. This is a concept I think many large conglomerate hosting providers really don't appreciate. We all understand and appreciate that service is what sets us apart and it is you, the clients, that feed our families.

And Beyond...

With years of great service under our belts, we look forward and envision a great future for Kattare Internet Services and the wonderful people (like you!) that make it possible.