About Adam

My name is Adam Ward and I currently reside in Kansas City, MO. I’ve been working with technology since 1997 (yep, twenty-two awesome years). I’ve had the joy of working for great companies, building a wildly successful business, selling that business and continuing my technological journey today.

Early Interest in Linux
I first started with Linux when I was twelve. My first Linux install was Caldera OpenLinux on a 75Mhz pentium processor (yep math co-processor and all). I loved tinkering with Linux, rebuilding kernels from source, and compiling new versions of PHP. This was way back in the day of kernel builds that take hours, PHP compilations that required so so many dependencies that it was quite a challenge. I can still remember having to order FreeBSD CD’s from a service that sold them cheap. 600-700MB ISO files would take an eternity (that’s 33853 Hours, 23 Minutes and 49 Seconds on dial-up!) I wasn’t sure where all this tinkering would lead, until my Aunt purchased me a domain in 1998 for Christmas.

Admo.net History
My aunt purchased a domain for me named “Admo.net” in 1998 for Christmas. I started a small site on a shared hosting plan with a Canadian hosting company called “Tera-Byte.com”. The site was created to offer free services (PHP counters were the most popular) and I quickly outgrew the shared hosting platform. I knew this fifteen year old had to find a way to keep the counters going!

I moved to a dedicated server (a RaQ3 — so fast!) and I was a very happy kid. Reality quickly set in and I realized this server was costing me a whopping $99.00/Mo. and I needed to find a way to pay for this server. I was completely intrigued with Linux, and after all, the RaQ 3 was based on Linux! If anyone has used a RaQ appliance before, the control panel wasn’t the most robust. Many times I found myself deep in perl and PHP, rooting around on the command line trying to troubleshoot issues.

I launched the small web hosting company (keeping the name Admo.net) in 1998 with the primary focus on great service. This company grew into a large-scale endeavor. In November 2016, Admo.net was acquired and I am now working for a great company as their Lead Systems Engineer.

This blog is an attempt to document my day-to-day findings and help me retain the things I learn. It’s always better for me to retain and remember topics when I write about them, and it’s pretty fun!

Thanks for reading!
Adam Ward