There is a company in the UK that provides Unix shells to their users: Mythic Beasts. They offer fantastic service to people who need a shell account on a very fast server, and don’t want to fork out silly amounts of money. Let’s talk to Chris Lightfoot, one of the company’s owners.

TM: Who is behind “Mythic Beasts”? How did everything start?

CL: There are six of us involved: Paul (see the photo), Richard, Pete, Tom, James and myself. Back in February 2000, I had the idea of setting up a colocated machine for our own use. I’ve dug out the original mail I sent inviting the others to get involved; it began,

• Plan: to host a computer somewhere, in order to have a decent platform to do web hosting, email, etc.
• Problem: cost.

At that time colocation was a bit more expensive than it is now! The first server itself cost us about £500.

Once we’d set things up for ourselves and our friends, we discovered that there was quite a lot of demand for Linux shell accounts, so (in August 2000) we registered as a UK limited company and Mythic Beasts Ltd. was born.

TM: Why the name “Mythic Beasts”?

CL: The name “Mythic Beasts” is a complete accident. Our first server was called “mythic”, because my convention is to name machines after adjectives and I thought the word “mythic” sounded good. That suggested the domain name “beasts”; when we came to set up the company—and remember that this was the tail-end of the dot.com era and lots of companies had much sillier names—we just recycled the name.

TM: Do you all work in the same office? Or do you normally work from home?

CL: No, we work all over the place, mostly communicating by email and now IRC.

TM: Did you have a specific philosophy behind your idea? Did you decide your target market before hand?

CL: The way the company started was, as I’ve said, a bit of an accident—we spotted demand for something and were in a position to supply it. The reason we originally set up the services for our own use was that we’d all had bad experiences with shared hosting providers before, and wanted something better.

The way the company started was a bit of an accident—we spotted demand for something and were in a position to supply it

We don’t have an official company philosophy or a mission statement which we engrave on paperweights (we don’t even have a pointy-haired boss!) but I think the closest thing we can come up with is that we’re all interested in selling services which we wouldn’t be ashamed to use ourselves.

Chris Lightfoot

TM: What operating system (or systems?) do you run on those servers? How many people actively work on the server for maintenance?

CL: At the moment everything runs Linux, mostly Debian but with some older (and heavily customised) RedHat installs. We’re not zealots about operating systems (well, not much, anyway). But Linux does everything we need at the moment.

Most of the server maintenance is done by Paul, Pete and me, but unless we’re installing new hardware, there isn’t all that much to do. Modern PC hardware seems to be pretty reliable as long as (a) you pay enough for it to start with, and (b) you can hot-swap hard disks in your RAID arrays, since those are the components that fail most often.

TM: Who is your average customer? Do you ever have problems such as people getting an account to install an IRC bot, or to crack other servers?

CL: Our typical shell account customer is interested in hosting one or several websites; we offer more flexibility than most hosting providers—for instance, our customers can write CGI scripts in more-or-less any language they want, can run web sites under FastCGI, etc.—and that’s attractive for people who want a service which isn’t going to get in their way too much.

We also have quite a few customers who use our services as an email service. Having a reliable shell account where you can run mutt or pine or whatever from anywhere in the world is a lot more convenient than running a desktop mail client and using web mail away from home (though obviously we support both of those options too). We also host some software developers who use our anonymous CVS services.