An Idea

There I was hunting deer in October of 2018 near Chemult around 8 AM sitting in my Jeep when the idea hit me. Central Oregon is the perfect spot for a data center. Most of the hosting is in Portland and it’s a major flood zone. Central Oregon is sitting on an old lava bed not prone to earthquakes, floods, tornados and any other natural disaster. Databases stored here are more safer than anywhere else in the United States!

I own an email list hygiene company. It’s called eHygienics. We clean email marketing lists and that has been my main source of income for the past 10 years. We serviced huge billion dollar companies and they trusted us with their precious consumer databases. For the last 2 years, there has been an influx of data breaches from Facebook to Dunn & Bradstreet and the problem is cheap web hosting.

Since Amazon opened up their servers for hosting domains, VPN, backups and email, the security for their servers diminished. You know the saying, the bigger you are, the hard you fall? This is the same with huge data centers. There are leaks everywhere and not enough man-power to manually monitor the servers. It’s mostly programatic. With this, there are loopholes and backdoors for hackers to do what they please.

I have been hosting anywhere from 20 – 40 websites on my own personal account with hostmonster. I have a shared server that costs me hundreds of dollars. Since most of my hosting have/has been for charity (churches) and personal hobbies (SEO/Website construction), I would be much happier if all of the data was stored locally and under my control. For example, when a suspicious IP tries to login to any port, I want to know!

Large data centers say they give you the reports and capabilities of monitoring suspicious activity, but you will need to set it up and most likely install the software for alerts and at a cost. What hit me was protection. What is protecting the deer out here in Chemult from my rifle is foliage. Bushes, trees and rolling hills/mountains. What if we build a data center with servers ourself that is faster with more foliage to protect customers from hunters?

The name popped in my head Central Oregon Online and the next week, after returning home from hunting, I purchase the domain centraloregon.online.