Our Story
When I look back at the path that brought Alex and me to Nubius, I’m grateful—to God for opening doors, to the people who trusted us, and for the challenges that taught us how to carry that trust.
Our story together began at eApps Hosting. Alex and I both brought solid technical experience when we joined its support team. We didn’t know then that we would eventually help lead the business, or that the partnership we built there would become the foundation of our own company.
Joining the eApps team
eApps set a high technical bar for its support engineers. There wasn’t a traditional three-tier support structure: the person responding to a customer was expected to work through all but the most difficult issues. That meant bringing experience to the role, working independently, and taking responsibility for the customer’s issue.
Even with my technical background, my first weeks were humbling. I was getting used to unfamiliar systems, the pace of the work, and the level of autonomy and responsibility expected of me. After two weeks of training on eApps’ systems and processes, I started working remotely. My manager went on vacation, I hadn’t yet met my teammates, and suddenly I was handling real tickets from customers who needed answers.
By Friday, I was asking myself, “What am I doing here?”
Many of the systems were custom-built, and the documentation could only take me so far. When my manager returned, he introduced me to the team and helped me find my footing. I kept learning, asking questions, and working through problems. Six months later, I was one of the department’s top performers.
Around that time, Alex joined.
We worked different shifts with a little overlap, but we soon recognized how well we worked together. Alex loved going deep into technology and had an extraordinary ability to master something new. I enjoyed solving technical problems too, and found myself increasingly drawn to developing people, improving processes, and building customer relationships.
Building solutions together
When we joined eApps, it was an established hosting company with about 15 people, more than $3 million in annual revenue, and customers around the world. Its founder’s background as a Deloitte IT consultant helped shape a professional approach to running the business. In that environment, we developed both our technical skills and our understanding of what it means to be responsible for customers’ infrastructure.
One customer that stays with me was a growing SaaS business. They started with a single server running their application and database. As they grew, Alex and I worked through each new challenge with them, listening to what they needed and digging into the problems together.
We initially separated the application and database, then helped them add development and testing environments and high availability. Later, as their applications and customer base expanded, database replication became a bottleneck. Alex designed a new architecture using Percona XtraDB across regions, keeping application connections local and using global load balancing to improve resilience.
That project captures a lot of what made our partnership work. I was close to the customer, understanding their concerns and helping them make the business case for the changes. Alex was right beside me, working through the technical details and shaping the architecture. We brought those perspectives together in a proposal the customer could understand and trust, then stayed involved through implementation, validation, and the support that followed.
Our responsibilities were different, but they overlapped throughout the work. I helped coordinate the implementation and validate the solution, and together we made sure we were ready to support what we had built. Working through challenges like these, we learned how much we could count on each other. That trust became a foundation for Nubius.
Leading the cloud hosting business
Our responsibilities expanded into architecture, network operations, customer accounts, and business leadership. Alex became CTO, and I became Managing Director following the sale of eApps. We were entrusted with running the combined cloud hosting division, bringing together eApps and the acquirer’s existing cloud hosting services.
We had come a long way from our early days on the eApps support team. The work now included major platform migrations, network upgrades, and storage improvements, along with responsibility for the people and customers depending on those systems.
Why we started Nubius
Over the years, we came to understand what mattered most to us about the work.
It was hearing a customer say, “I can breathe again, thank you.” It was being trusted enough that customers thought of us as part of their team. And it was knowing we had stayed with a difficult problem until they had a way forward.
We also saw how easily a customer’s actual needs could get lost behind packages, sales targets, and rigid ways of working.
We started Nubius because we wanted to build a company around the relationships and responsibilities we valued. We wanted the freedom to understand each customer’s situation, recommend what made sense, and help them build dependable infrastructure without spending more than they needed to.
What we’re building today
Today at Nubius, Alex and I are putting that experience to work alongside our growing team. We’re implementing modern distributed storage, migrating workloads to capable and cost-effective platforms, and bringing together tools for monitoring, automation, and lifecycle management to keep our customers’ infrastructure reliable and easier to operate.
These projects bring together much of what we’ve learned: how to design infrastructure, how to work through difficult changes, and how to keep systems running reliably. They also keep us learning. Alex still loves digging into a technical challenge, and I still enjoy working through it with him and the customer, making sure the solution makes sense for their business.
As our team grows, we’re passing on that same approach: listen carefully, share what you know, take responsibility, and support one another.
I’m grateful we get to keep doing this work together. There is much more we want to build at Nubius, and we want our customers and colleagues to help shape it. My hope is that, as we grow, people continue to know us for the same things: we care about getting it right, we stay involved, and we keep our word.
— Sergio Gutiérrez, Co-founder and CEO