Meet the team
Our growth is thanks to strong roots, and great clients
Simon Blackler
Founding Partner
Simon co-founded the company in 2002, aged 17. He is the company's architect and spends most of his time planning how to realise his vision for Krystal.
Out of the office, when not in the gym or cycling, he spends his time learning new skills. His most recent endeavours are skydiving and playing the piano, though not at the same time. He loves lamp.
Tom Mason
Technical Director
Tom helped Simon provide technical support during the "University Years" (see below) and became a full partner in 2003. He has terrible fashion sense.
Tom is exceptionally good at fixing things and one of the reasons why our support is so highly rated! Tom believes he is awesome at skiing, but, to-date, no one else has been able to verify this.
Steve Sant
Support Evangelist
As Krystal grew in size so did the support load. To cope Simon brought in Steve, a longstanding client, in 2010. (Steve's the one on the right)
Steve's got years of experience (and we mean YEARS!) in the IT field which he uses to great effect to help solve clients' issues. In his spare time Steve uses his private pilots license to get airborne as much as possible.
It starts on a trampoline
It was the summer of 2002. Two school friends were creating a website that would eventually become one of the worlds most successful gaming communities, the Nexus Forums. Those friends were Simon Blackler & Robin Scott. While taking a break on the trampoline they got to talking about the nature of website design, and how people were charging an awful lot, for not very much. Given their new found skills they postulated that perhaps they could do a better job, and for less. So, as the young are want to do, we just got on and did it!
Formative times
Writing and designing websites exposed us to a entire layer of technology we'd not had to deal with before, the Internet. Learning by practice taught us quickly about this thing called "hosting", the role of domain names, what nameservers and zone files were and how they worked. Critically, we also got to experience first hand how bad web hosting companies dealt with clients, particularly with respect to contact and accountability. It was this frustration that would drive Krystal into the hosting arena. We knew that we could do a better job then anyone we'd come across and strove to be honest, reliable and personal in all our dealings - qualities we still practice today.
Our mantra is simple;-
“Focus on providing the best service, trade with integrity and be honest and profit will naturally follow, it shouldn't be your primary goal.”University years
In early 2003 we incorporated Krystal Solutions LLP and by the end of the year we'd stopped designing websites, deciding instead to focus exclusively on hosting them. I went to study Computer Science at Exeter and met Tom. We started with a US based reseller plan which we outgrew as word spread of a hosting company that actually cared about their client base. A US based rented dedicated server followed, which exposed us to a new tranche of learning opportunities. We learnt about servers, the role of the kernel, which hard drives, RAM and CPU combinations/configurations provided the best performance and how to harden a server against attack by configuring firewalls and other security defences. It wasn't long before we needed another, and then another. As university finished I started to think about the long term. We had 4 servers in the US and it was time to evolve again. Plans were made towards the end of the year to move our operations from the US to the UK.
Odyssey
In January 2007 we undertook our trans-atlantic migration, the single biggest, and most important, business decision we've ever taken. The plan was to migrate all of our hosting plans across the ocean, from rented US servers to our own owned infrastructure. We took out a cabinet at The Bunker and purchased our own router, firewall, switch and servers. With our roots underground, safely protected in an ultra secure ex-MOD bunker datacentre, we migrated our operation in full. It was a rougher ride than we'd have hoped for but our loyal clients stood by us and when the dust had settled they were well rewarded. Performance was markedly improved, having no trans-atlantic round trip delay, and with us in direct control of every aspect of our operation, from our internet connectivity all the way up to the software that ran on top of the servers, and everything in between, we were able to provide them with an exceptional level of service, all the while backed by UK support.
Present day
Since then we've doubled in size each year, without advertising. In April 2011 we went back to our long time partners, The Bunker, and commissioned them to build out our own suite, capable of housing 5 cabinets. From this strong position we're very excited about the next phase of our future, and we're glad that you're here to share it with us.