It was 2016. I had a decent blog growing, and shared hosting just wasn't cutting it anymore. Slow, limited, constantly hitting resource limits. I decided to move to a VPS.
How hard could it be?
Pretty hard, as it turns out.
The Struggle Was Real
I bought a VPS from a popular provider. Got the login credentials. And then... nothing made sense. SSH? Terminal? Apache vs Nginx? What even is a LAMP stack?
I spent 2 months trying to get my WordPress site migrated. I watched dozens of tutorials. I broke the server multiple times. I lost data. I almost gave up.
The Moment of Clarity
If I — someone who understood web hosting reasonably well — was struggling this much, imagine what regular developers and small agencies were going through.
That's when I decided to build ServerAvatar.
What Started as a Personal Tool Became a SaaS
The first version was just a script I wrote for myself. Then I shared it with a few friends. Then they told their colleagues. Within months, I had paying customers for something I built to solve my own problem.
ServerAvatar is now 9+ years old. It's gone through 4 major versions. And it's still the tool I use first whenever I need to manage a server.
Lesson learned: The best products usually start as solutions to your own problems.
Adarsh Sojitra
Founder & CEO of ServerAvatar. Building tools that make cloud hosting simple since 2016.