You ask, our small support team answers… (the phone, email, chat ping ;) because we love wrenching, fixing, optimizing… figuring things out. Always ready for the next puzzle — we’re just wired that way. We’re curious.
The stories below come from Nathan and the two Logans, but they reflect the vibe of the whole Brownrice team—including Vanessa, Tucker, Michael, Lapis, Geordie, Kristin, and Oban. Different roles, different backgrounds, one shared approach to the work.
“Okay… but why is it doing that?”
Some people restart the server. Nathan starts investigating.
Nathan, our Director of Security, is the kind of person who naturally wants to understand how every part of a system works together — and how to make it perform better. Hosting environments, performance maxing, security hardening, turbocharged project cars… if it can be optimized, tuned, rebuilt, or improved, he’s probably interested in it. Ask him about the 1990 Miata he rebuilt around a standalone open-source ECU making 315+ wheel horsepower. He built, assembled, and tuned every bit of it himself, in his home shop.
That’s pretty much how he debugs, too.
“I once moved a website from another host onto our latest and greatest VPS. The site was dead-slow on our servers but fast on the old host. After much debugging, we found the previous host had hidden code that made the site wait 15 seconds before loading. Once I removed that, it was faster than ever.”
Not hardware. Not bandwidth.
Just deeply weird code, buried where nobody thought to look.
“For me, I’m a debugger. It’s deeply satisfying to take something that’s not working, or working poorly, and optimize or otherwise improve it.”
“Slow down and check the basics.”
Logan D, our Support Technician and resident Culinarian, speaks from experience when he says the right recipe matters. Around the office, we let him cook—helping calibrate the saltwater tank, troubleshooting a hosting problem, whatever needs figuring out. The approach is the same: mind the details, follow the process, don’t skip steps.
“With the complexity that is hosting — domains, DNS, VPSs — it can be hard to keep track of where everything is. Many times something overlooked by taking someone’s word for it can lead you down a winding path that leads nowhere.”
So before the deep dive starts, he verifies everything himself — even when the customer is certain.
Nathan lands in the same place:
“Always start from the bottom and double check the obvious. Domain whois, nameservers, DNS. Follow the chain and make sure nothing gets overlooked.”
And when everything finally comes together — chef’s kiss:
“It’s satisfying to be presented with new issues that can be solved by building off of things you’ve learned from previous problems. It always keeps you looking for solutions via different paths you may or may not have taken in the past.
“Also, very satisfying to recognize an issue and solve it immediately when that previously may have had you banging your head against the wall!”
“Sometimes you have to go straight to the source.”
Our Data Center Manager, Logan G, spends most of his time building things — servers, infrastructure, hardware, systems with layers of redundancy, from micro to macro — solid, scalable, and resilient by design.
Maybe that’s why Logan spends so much time outside — farming, working with his hands, chasing quiet somewhere in Northern New Mexico. Out there, you learn quickly: real stewardship means improving the larger environment — not just patching the problem in front of you, but strengthening everything connected to it. (…and yes, the data center is 100% green. We can’t help ourselves.)
“We had one customer with a hacked WordPress site, which we cleaned, but couldn’t get Google to stop showing the This site may be hacked link in their search results. So I emailed Google support.”
“Much to my surprise they scheduled a video call, and I got to talk to humans, face to face. They asked all sorts of questions about how we clean up hacks, how they could make our lives easier as sysadmins, etc. One of them was even from Taos, my hometown and the location of our data center!”
Most would say, “That’s beyond the scope of support.”
So, why does Logan G do it?
“Just helping people. More importantly, showing them how to help themselves using some of the awesome tools we’ve created over the years. Building the hardware that makes these things work is what keeps me hooked.”
Curious people. Thoughtful systems. Real support.
That’s the Brownrice approach.
From the other side of the support ticket…
“I am a SUPER happy customer of Brownrice! This is how web hosting should be. Friendly, helpful, responsive, and informative. Virtually no downtime. Anytime I’ve needed support they have been right there, and pointed me to resources so I could be more hands-on. I highly recommend Brownrice Internet for anyone looking for a hosting company run by real humans who care about what they do.”
★★★★★
Google Review
Free migrations. Real support on every plan.
We’re converting our first-layer of spam protection from straight spamassassin gateways to Proxmox Mail Gateways and I’ve gotta say, the conversion has been magically easy and results have fantastically pleasing. We use these gateways to pre-scan all incoming email for spam and viruses before passing those emails on to our email customers.
Well, it depends on quite a few things, but let’s start by looking at some server settings and example web applications.
What goes into the Brownrice SmartVPS? First off, we use OpenVZ as our virtualization software. OpenVZ container virtualization is by far the best solution for our customers because 1) Its wicked fast and 2) We can configure it so that our custom AutoTune, AutoScale, and Server Management scripts can enter your container seamlessly to monitor and ensure that things are always finely optimized without you having to do anything.