Recalling those heady days of 1997's Internet gold rush, tech whiz Thomas Krwawecz III knew he was onto something when he'd made more money in a single week than he would have by flipping burgers all summer. "I was already getting about $4,000 month from one company and then I'd cashed a $10,000 check from an Australian company. Now that was a great week!" he says.
Though Krwawecz (pronounced "KRAW-wecks") had a life-long interest in technology and taught himself HTML, he was getting bored fast with his school's curriculum. At that time, in his first semester at New Jersey's Institute for Technology, dorm residents only knew of Krwawecz as the "go-to guy" for tech hardware.
These days, Krwawecz, 24, is known as the CEO of Blue Gravity Communications (www.bluegravity.com), and a former college roommate now works for him. In addition to design, domain registration, and other services, the company hosts approximately 30,000 distinct Websites, and its clients pay from $10 to $20,000 monthly for its premium services.
"Often times when I meet customers at the [various trade] shows, they're shocked [at my age]. Usually they want to know when I started, how it happened, etcetera. The business is now full of young, aggressive, competitive businessmen and women, so it's becoming less of an issue," Krwawecz says.
Krwawecz remembers that most hosting companies in the late 1980s were mom-and-pop operations, and therefore ill-equipped to handle the high traffic an early version of Blue Gravity began attracting. "Initially, Blue Gravity and XXXHosting.com were used for our own sites and built around a reliable foundation... then other Webmasters started to contact us as early as 1996 to see if we could put their sites on our network," he says.
When about five to 10 of his peers would contact him weekly, looking for a reliable adult Web host platform, Krwawecz began to see a huge demand for quality hosting services for adult Webmasters.
Enter Blue Gravity. (Without regard to interstellar nebulae and their ilk, the origin of the company's moniker was more terrestrial. "I just sat down and tried to come up with something catchy and creative that would stick in people's mind when they heard the name," says Krwawecz.) Hindsight has proven the adage 'you get what you pay for' - as Krwawecz explains it, Blue Gravity's servers are built from scratch and stacked in 19-inch racks, each with its own switch. Those switches are connected via Ethernet to a 1,000-gigabit per second network, in effect boosting the original transmission tenfold.
Clearly, Krwawecz says, "No expense is spared on hardware. We prefer to sell quality bandwidth even if it means charging a little bit more."
Since all machines are custom-built to the specifications and requirements of each Blue Gravity client, additional hardware such as RAID cards can be added as needed.
"Since we're around the corner from Sprint's Network Access Point, we've lit an OC-3 between our facilities with the ability to fire up additional fiber with a simple phone call. UUNET connectivity is delivered via OC-48 from Philadelphia," Krwawecz says.
Blue Gravity's 12,000-square foot Pennsauken, NJ facility houses its around-the-clock network and server monitor grids. "We've invested a great deal of time and money on network equipment and backbone providers to ensure quality of service. Our customers expect their Websites to be up and running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and they're willing to spend a few more bucks for that piece of mind," Krwawecz says.
With this amount of attention to the bottom line, the specter of professional burnout lurks frequently near those who earn success early in life. When Krwawecz looks ahead, he doesn't foresee any gray skies. "I enjoy the challenge, and the people who work around me make life easy. They're soldiers. They're the ones who work hard every day to make sure Blue Gravity customers are happy, that support requests are processed quickly, and that things run smooth," he says.
Recently, Blue Gravity clients like LaurieWallace.com and xxxFatGangbang.com made appearances on Howard Stern's nationally syndicated cable and radio shows. For many Websites, the resulting onslaught of traffic from such an appearance results in server overload and even shutdown. Not so for Blue Gravity's clients. "It's business as usual," Krwawecz says.
When he's not working (which is usually only a small window during the weekends), the New Jersey native prefers to relax with friends, play cards, fish during summer and ski during the winter.
When quizzed on it, Krwawecz can easily recite his mantra for success: "Keep hustling. Stay honest. And invest the time to earn respect."
