First a little bit about me. My name is Daniel Barney, I am married to Lindsey, my best friend, and we have 4 children together. I have worked in various early and late stage startups since 2003, and have done a little bit of everything. My favorite software projects I have built are:

• A game of GO written in C on my Palm m100, with the stylus, during High School classes (sorry teachers) – 2002
• Distributed fan in/out event forwarder to enable extremely dynamic websites – 2012
• VXLan based SDN for an illumos based Container cloud – 2014
• 1M points / second metric collector and compressor – 2017
• Automatic disk image builder/validator for a public cloud – 2019
• A toy CDN that uses GBP to route requests to the data center nearest the requester – 2022
• Service to automatically run pushed docker images as small VMs – 2023

I grew up fixing cars, our house, and things around the yard. I love working with my hands, and in high school I found I have a talent for programming and working with computers. Even though I don’t have as much time as I used to, I still build and do a lot of things by myself, like laying patio stones, fixing my vehicles, assembling batteries, and self hosting things on my home lab. Most recently I have started dabbling in hydroponics as growing food is essential for everyone.

I always seem to have 100’s of projects in motion at the same time. It stresses Lindsey out a little bit, but to me it’s normal. I think it’s a side effect of working as a software developer for such a long time. I always had multiple things I was working on, and I managed to keep all of them in motion without too many problems.

In 2024 I decided it was time to get serious about starting my own business. Mostly I wanted to have the freedom to create what I wanted to create, and build what I wanted to build. Since I have worked in various cloud and hosting related business for almost 15 years, I decided to play to my strengths and start a new cloud hosting provider. I had other ideas, but BentoBox.Cloud is the one I decided had the most possibilities.

I’ve dealt with a lot of different clouds. I’ve done scalable resourced based ones. I’ve worked at developer focused ones. I’ve also used bare metal hardware. The one thing that I didn’t like that was in common with all of them, is how they schedule resources. It’s all shared. When you order a VM with a CPU, that CPU has been over scheduled. When it came with a disk, that disk could break if you filled it up 100%. Many different VMs are trying to use that same CPU, or disk, and sometimes there are not enough resources available for everyone. It’s cheep, but might not be usable and could fail at any point without notice.

BentoBox.Cloud only does dedicated resources. No other VM is assigned to run on the CPU cores of the hypervisor that you have purchased. This makes us a lot less money per machine than other cloud providers. It also means we need to manage these machines a lot less too.

Hence why I think BentoBox.Cloud is a good idea: No one should overpay for resources that they might need, but may not be available. Dedicated resources enable Simple, Stable, and Affordable cloud hosting.

Well, that’s me and my ideas. If you want to chat, I’m not on any social platforms (for reasons), but you can reach me at my email address daniel@bentobox.cloud.

If you have read this far, thanks! make sure to try out BentoBox.cloud!