Around 2014 I started a tiny archive out of a VPS I rented. My friends and I realized that wasn't enough so we bought 3 8TB drives for $600 each and racked them on a C2550D4I board from Asrock wih 32GB of ram.
That wasn't enough, also it died a horrible death due to the intel bug that killed the C2550 / C2750 CPUs. And we lost a disk. Lessons learned.
We moved up to a 12 bay Quantagrid system which worked better but had no firmware security, was expensive to colo, and we outgrew it in a matter of a year.
After several iterations of building increasingly complex systems, Z Plus was officially created around 2021, along with getting our own ASN and IP blocks. Helped me scale the archives faster, self hosting to save money and ultimately lead to where we are now.
When I started archiving there were no "easy" ways to gain access to large amounts of storage that didn't have something majorly wrong. Between overselling, bad geolocation (storage in Europe when I'm in USA?), high prices (some storage servers along that time were asking in the range where you could buy a whole disk every month!), and terrible network performance. There were always a severe compromise. I made it a mission to help build storage for my archiving friends, my own archives, and to help FOSS projects that provide me and others with benefit.
By using what I've learned over the past 10 years, Z Plus is now able to offer sustainable storage options to clients.
We are also a big believer in owning your data. Our slot hosting is semi-unique, and allows clients to own the physical disk their data resides on. This also allows other options, like shipping disks to a location to do restores instead of transferring many TBs of data over the network. Great way to send in 20TB of data and instantly be able to access it.
Some of our options are memes like NUC hosting, while others are serious like the 20TB volumes. If it works it works.
A Basement. Don't expect 5 9's, but it's not as bad as 4 8's so should be alright. 10g networking to the rack.