24 years of buantel.com: from FreeBSD in the bedroom to SaaS in production

In July 2002, Buantel, Inc. was incorporated and I posted the first news item on this domain. The "datacenter" was my bedroom in Toronto: a FreeBSD hosting box on a cable line, then a 3Meg DSL connection that felt like a superhighway, and a growing pile of rescued Sun and SGI hardware that my parents politely questioned.

The old news feed — which the Internet Archive kept safe for two decades, and which you can now read again on our News section — tells the story in real time. A Sun Ultra 30 running Solaris 9 as a secondary DNS server. A Dell PowerEdge 2300 bought as a "holidays server upgrade." MailScanner with McAfee and SpamAssassin, installed at the server level because spam was eating everyone alive in 2004. We waived setup fees over the holidays and took payments by PayPal and money order.

Then, in 2004, the news feed went quiet. Not because Buantel stopped — because the work moved. I spent the next two decades running infrastructure at scale: global IT operations, cloud migrations, SANs, compliance frameworks, security stacks, and teams across continents. The lessons compounded — every cutover, every restore that had to work, every audit — and the domain sat patiently, hosting email and memories.

Why the site is back

In 2022 I posted a one-line update: "After 18 year hiatus we are building our website back up! :) Yahoo". This relaunch finishes that thought. Buantel today is two things:

• A consulting practice — the same discipline from those early server-room days, applied to modern problems: virtualization migrations (VMware exits included), endpoint security rollouts, privileged access, and cloud moves with rollback plans.
• A product shop — because after 25 years of operating other people's software, I started building my own. CompxOne (compliance without SaaS lock-in) is live in beta; univmcon, Superauth, AutoCertX, and others are in active development.

The through-line from 2002 to now is the same: own the infrastructure, understand it down to the metal, and leave things more reliable than you found them. The bedroom datacenter just got bigger.

Working on a migration or thinking about a build? Reach me at jeff@buantel.com.