Our Story
High expectations. Shared challenges. The partnership that became Nubius Solutions.
When I look back at the path that brought Alex and me to Nubius Solutions, I’m grateful to God for opening doors, to the people who trusted us, and for the challenges that taught us how to carry that trust.
Our story together began at eApps Hosting, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with multiple data centers. Alex and I both brought solid technical experience when we joined its support team. We didn’t know then that we would eventually help lead the business, or that the partnership we built there would become the foundation of our own company.
A demanding school and a new partner
eApps set a high technical bar for its support engineers. The job went well beyond server administration: support engineers were also expected to solve networking and storage problems. There wasn’t a traditional three-tier support structure, so the person responding to a customer worked through all but the most difficult issues. That meant working independently and taking responsibility for solving the customer’s problem.
Even with my technical background, my first weeks were humbling. After two weeks of training, I started working remotely, adjusting to unfamiliar systems, a demanding pace, and a high level of autonomy and responsibility. My manager went on vacation, I hadn’t yet met my teammates, and suddenly I was handling customer issues on my own.
By Friday, I was asking myself, “What am I doing here?”
When my manager returned, he introduced me to the team and helped me find my footing. I kept learning, asking questions, and working through problems. Six months later, I was one of the department’s top performers.
Around that time, Alex joined.
We worked different shifts with a little overlap, but we soon recognized how well we worked together. Alex loved going deep into technology and had an extraordinary ability to master something new. I enjoyed solving technical problems too, and found myself increasingly drawn to developing people, improving processes, and building customer relationships.
Building solutions together
eApps served customers around the world, with thousands of virtual servers and a network spanning its data centers. Its founder’s background as a Deloitte IT consultant helped shape a professional approach to running the business and a simple rule: when there was a conflict, we resolved it in the customer’s favor. In that environment, we developed both our technical skills and our understanding of what it means to be responsible for customers’ infrastructure.
One customer that stays with me was a growing SaaS business. They started with a single server running their application and database. As they grew, Alex and I worked through each new challenge with them, listening to what they needed and digging into the problems together.
We initially separated the application and database, then helped them add development and testing environments and high availability. Later, as their applications and customer base expanded, database replication became a bottleneck. Alex designed a new architecture using Percona XtraDB across regions, keeping application connections local and using global load balancing to improve resilience.
That project captures a lot of what made our partnership work. I was close to the customer, understanding their concerns and helping them make the business case for the changes. Alex was right beside me, working through the technical details and shaping the architecture. We brought those perspectives together in a proposal the customer could understand and trust.
I helped coordinate the implementation and validate the solution. Together, we made sure support procedures were in place and followed up with the customer afterward. Through projects like these, we learned how much we could count on each other. That trust became a foundation for Nubius.
Leading the cloud hosting business
As we took on more responsibility, our work grew to include architecture, network operations, customer accounts, and business leadership. Alex became CTO, and I took charge of operations.
When eApps was acquired by a larger managed IT services company, I became Managing Director and Alex continued as CTO of the combined cloud hosting division, which brought together eApps and the acquirer’s existing cloud hosting services. We ran the division for more than three years.
Before and after the acquisition, alongside our customer work, we led major improvements to the platform.
We migrated thousands of virtual servers from Xen to KVM and moved the VM platform from a proprietary solution to OpenNebula. We replaced the storage system with StorPool distributed storage for high availability and capacity that could grow as needed. Its pay-as-you-go pricing kept storage costs in line with actual usage. We also implemented DDoS mitigation at the network layer and an integrated firewall system across all data centers.
We had come a long way from our early days on the support team. As our responsibilities grew, we had to look after both the infrastructure and the people who depended on it.
Why we started Nubius
Over the years, we came to understand what mattered most to us about the work.
It was hearing a customer say, “I can breathe again, thank you.” It was being trusted enough that customers thought of us as part of their team. And it was knowing we had stayed with a difficult problem until they had a way forward.
Across the hosting industry, we also saw how easily a customer’s actual needs could get lost behind packages, sales targets, and rigid ways of working.
We started Nubius because we wanted to build a company around the relationships and responsibilities we valued. We wanted the freedom to understand each customer’s situation, recommend what made sense, and help them build dependable infrastructure without spending more than they needed to.
What we’re building today
Today at Nubius, Alex and I are putting that experience to work alongside our growing team. We’re implementing modern distributed storage, migrating workloads to capable and cost-effective platforms, and bringing together tools for monitoring, automation, and lifecycle management to keep our customers’ infrastructure reliable and easier to operate.
These projects draw on much of what we’ve learned about designing infrastructure, working through difficult changes, and keeping systems running reliably. They also keep us learning. Alex still loves digging into a technical challenge, and I still enjoy working through it with him and the customer, making sure the solution makes sense for their business.
As our team grows, we’re passing on that same approach: listen carefully, share what you know, take responsibility, and support one another.
I’m grateful for the partnership Alex and I have forged and for the team that now shares in this work. As Nubius grows, I hope our customers continue to know us for the same things: we care about getting it right, we stay involved, and we keep our word.
— Sergio Gutiérrez, Co-founder and CEO