About Us
Learn what Nitrous Networks is about and strives for.
Nitrous Networks was created in July of 2010 by Jordan Bryant. With a very generous start up loan injected into the company by Jordan’s father, Jordan began the journey of what Nitrous Networks is today! Providing game, voice and web services to thousands of customers located all around the globe. Striving to deliver a more affordable approach to game servers, that's both reliable and feature rich!
2010
Initially in 2010, Nitrous Networks offered a wide array of services including game servers, dedicated servers, web hosting, virtual private servers, and also voice servers. We had started out buying a job lot of hardware recently decommissioned from a London based hosting provider for a very low price. And proceeded to collocate it within a data centre located in Cheltenham. But it wasn’t without its faults, like most hardware produced between 2008 & 2010, but still, Jordan ploughed through any issues and soon was hosting for over 100 customers within a couple of months of operating.
Jordan quickly found that offering such a wide spectrum of services was putting a considerable strain on both finances, and himself and needed to scale back to core services which had the most demand and in which capital expenditure was quickly returned in order to further the growth of the business.
Enter Harry Beasant! Harry joined the Nitrous Networks family in December 2010 with a 10% stake in the company. Harry injected much needed additional capital to keep the business ticking over. Capital injected by Harry was to be used to scale the form factor of our servers from 2U down to 1U systems in order to maximize the amount of servers we could have within our current rack.
2011
However, Jordan’s prior realisation had come a little too late and in January of 2011 Nitrous Networks was faced with a major hurdle, bandwidth costs. At £12/Mbps per month and a 100Mbps bandwidth overage bill totalling £1200. Which might not sound like a lot of bandwidth now, but back then this was easily what 1Gbps is now. At this point we had to pull out of the data centre we were housing servers within and re-evaluate our options.
During this transitional period we sought out aid from VeloxServ. Scoring a deal with them for few dedicated servers that we were able to use to carry over our game server customers from previously collocated servers whilst a new business plan was drawn up, mapping out Nitrous’ future.
In March / April of 2011 Nitrous Networks approached a data centre operator located in Sheffield, which operated a data centre by the name of simply “Sheffield Data Centre”. Quickly we negotiated a new colocation agreement which would allow us to scale up server, by server with the exact power / bandwidth requirement we needed.
After this was done. We initially shipped 2x Dell Poweredge 1950 III servers up to them which we would use to kick start our Minecraft hosting offering, and continue our hosting of games we had previously offered in 2010. At this point we had chosen to use the control panel ServerGears. ServerGears was a light weight, powerful control panel that offered easy management from the customer perspective.
All was going well! Our services were a big hit within the Minecraft community especially, and we had expanded our initial 2 servers, to 3 within 5 weeks. It’s at this point in which a friend of Jordan’s, who had previously helped tremendously in the development of Nitrous’ first website, approached him with the proposal of merging his company, Absolute Hosting, into Nitrous’ due to personal commitments which saw him no longer able to maintain and dedicate as much time towards Absolute Hosting as he had hoped. As part of this merger we saw the addition of Perri to our team. And the addition of roughly 50 customers!
Along came a new site overhaul! Nitrous Networks launched its 2nd site design in June of 2011, based around a paid template at the time from themeforest. It served its purpose, but not for very long. To date this site design has been the only one that was purchased from a template site. And either not developed in house or by a professional web designer or agency.
Once again in June of 2011 we required further capacity to take on additional users. It is then that we started to custom build our servers again. This time we started offering SSD based storage for game servers. With the price of SSD based storage being over £1/GB at this time it was considerably more for us to purchase this hardware, but we did, and it proved to be an excellent decision for us. It was also at this point that we started using the TCAdmin (version 1) control panel. The migration from ServerGears to TCAdmin was sped up considerably weeks later as ServerGears were ceasing development and were closing down.

With our shiny new SSD based servers, and fancy new control panel we continued expanding month to month, and going from strength to strength, until we hit another wall, DDoS attacks.
With online gaming communities expanding left and right it was only a matter of time before this would happen, and it did. We saw a rapid increase in customers receiving attacks, so much so that it would cause extreme issues for the whole data centre, and all customers within it. Back in 2011, it was the norm for most networks to have 100Mbps switch ports to servers, and 1GbE edge uplinks to carriers. So with what was considered “massive attacks” back in 2011 with servers receiving close to 1Gbps, or just over this in malicious traffic it would easily cause problems for not only the target of the attack, not only the whole rack the server was housed within, but the whole network the data centre operated on.
Due to this becoming a common occurrence primarily to Garry’s Mod servers at the time. The data centre operator was left with no choice but to give us notice to vacate and find a new location to house our equipment within. It’s at this point we then turned to VeloxServ in July of 2011, to negotiate a new colocation agreement. They had providers that were better equipped to handle the attacks our customers were receiving, even if it was simply null routing an IP temporarily to stop it affecting other customers both within our rack, and on the network in general.
In September 2011 Nitrous Networks was registered as a Limited company within England & Wales. Unfortunately Perri had left Nitrous at this point.

Once again, all was going well and we were now up to 15/16 server nodes by Christmas time! Which is where we hit another problem with our control panel database, which resulted in a complete rebuild which took close to 3 days to complete. What seemed like a near on impossible task was soon tackled with perseverance, and raw determination.
2012
Now with 2011 in our rear view mirror, we hit 2012 which was a groundbreaking year for us! We had fully migrated to using TCAdmin as our game control panel of choice. We had started upgrading our hardware, phased out the older Dell Poweredge servers & Core 2 Quad servers and had started using Intel’s new Sandybridge Core i7, and E3 series processors!
Fairly early on in the year we contacted a web designer by the name of Owen Melbourne. He created what was Nitrous Networks 3rd website design and also introduced the rocket into our logo which followed on all future logo variations, and sites from 2012 to now.
Things started snowballing even more and by June of 2012 we were now hosting over 800 game servers. This then escalated further to us hosting over 1000 game servers under a month later! It was around this point that Jordan ceased all other commitments and pursued Nitrous full time.
In 2012 we also partnered with Buycraft, originally offering “keys” to our customers on request that would entitle the user to free premium for as long as they had the server with us. This system then changed to what is now the 30 day free premium trial. We also partnered with Enjin to offer our customers 45 days free of their advanced plan.
Now at around September 2012 we started planning what would now be known as NiTROPanel, our in house, Minecraft orientated control panel. After a couple of weeks of initial planning. Development of NiTROPanel started! The control panel was heavily built around user input in order to build a powerful control panel suited for the end user. And we’re proud to say that it’s been a huge success!
By October 2012 NiTROPanel was developed enough to be used in production! At this point we started housing servers at a data centre in Wolverhampton too, and we were up to ~50 server nodes at this point. By the end of December 2012 we were at around 70-75 server nodes, and additional features were being added to NiTROPanel on a regular basis, we had also done a complete overhaul of the original UI.
2013
Now entering 2013 we hit the ground running with more NiTROPanel features! Due to problems with DDoS attacks in Wolverhampton towards the end of 2012 we spent the first week in January transporting servers from Wolverhampton to Cheltenham.
Within January 2013, we also merged customers from LVN Host over into Nitrous. As part of this merger we also welcomed Mikkel to Nitrous for several months before he moved on.
In 2013 we added a new location, Quebec, Canada for Minecraft servers.
We also saw the addition of Robert Thornback to our support team in July of 2013.
Within July we changed our registered company name to Hydra Communications Ltd, and kept Nitrous Networks as a trading name under this company.