Celebrating 10 Years as NetActuate

This year, NetActuate marks its 10th anniversary.

NetActuate was born out of a merger of two very hands-on, very technical hosting companies. We came together because we shared the same instincts: build things that work, stay close to customers, and take full ownership of the infrastructure and services we deliver.

 We think of our role like plumbing: nobody notices when it works, everybody notices when it doesn’t. Pipes are built to reliably carry whatever flows through them, without fanfare or friction. That mindset shaped NetActuate from day one, and it still shapes how we operate today.

The world is getting more connected, and more dependent

A typical home used to have a phone line and maybe a Wi-Fi router. Now it has a small fleet of always-connected devices: phones, laptops, TVs, cameras, thermostats, speakers, doorbells, and a growing list of “smart” everything. Businesses have done the same thing at scale. More applications. More endpoints. More regions. More regulations. More expectations.

At the same time, billions of people have come online and billions more are on the way. Connectivity has widened access to education, created new markets, and given small businesses reach that would have been impossible a generation ago. The internet has done a lot of good, and it is still doing it.

But as the world gets more connected, the underlying infrastructure needs to get more resilient. More predictable. More global. And frankly, easier to operate in production.

That’s what drives how we operate as NetActuate. Not to chase trends, but to make it possible for real teams to run global systems without being crushed by complexity.

The philosophy that never changed

Both sides of the merger came from deep roots in open source and real operations. Linux and FreeBSD. BGP. Carrier hotels. Countless hours spent deep in the MMR. The uncomfortable lessons you only learn when you’re the one getting paged in the middle of the night.

That background made our beliefs pretty simple:

• Technology should be easy to use, even when the underlying systems are hard.
  
  
• Customers should have real choice, not vendor lock-in disguised as convenience.
  
  
• Global is the only scale that matters when your customers are everywhere.

That philosophy shows up in our mission and in our work: Presence. Forward. Move the network forward. Move customer platforms forward. Make it easier to build, deploy, and operate globally.

Bootstrapped, scrappy, and in the trenches

NetActuate has never been a “big company” story. We built this the hard way: bootstrapped, customer by customer, deployment by deployment, problems to solutions.

That forced discipline. It also gave us freedom. We stayed focused on what matters: engineering, operations, and doing right by customers when it counts.

We are not a hyperscaler, and we are not trying to be one. We’re a small, lean team that runs critical infrastructure 24×7, and we take that responsibility seriously. We show up. We fix things. We ship improvements. We keep the lights on.

What 10 years looks like in the real world

Over the last decade, the work added up.

We’ve grown into one of the most interconnected networks on the internet. Today, we’re the 4th largest network in the world by number of peers, with a footprint that spans dozens of markets across every major continent, and a growing number of network POPs.

Our Anycast platform and edge services have become part of the backbone for global SaaS, security providers, DNS operators, and other internet-critical services. Many of our partners serve tens of millions of end users. Their services need to be fast, resilient, and predictable worldwide, and we help them achieve this.

A few milestones worth remembering

• Launch: NetActuate officially launched in 2016, bringing managed colocation and global infrastructure services into a footprint that was already operating at real scale.
  
  
• Anycast became a core platform: We invested heavily in Anycast-first design, interconnection, and global consistency, and published the anycast.com resource hub.
  
  
• Footprint expansion, everywhere it matters: We kept adding and upgrading capacity in major markets across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, with attention to performance and consistent work on redundancy.
• Enterprise readiness: Over time we strengthened the operational controls, support model, and platform tooling customers need, while staying agile, flexible, and accountable.
• Partnership model: We formalized how we work with customers into a true partnership for mutual success, working seamlessly to optimize IT investments and solve challenges.

The common thread through our evolution is simple: we keep building, and we keep showing up.

Thank you. Seriously.

If you’ve worked with us, you know this company runs on the people doing the work.

To our team: thank you. You do the hard parts. You do it without drama. You do it with pride. You keep critical systems running for customers around the world, even when nobody sees it. That is real, and it matters.

To our customers and partners: thank you for trusting us with critical parts of your infrastructure. You keep us honest. You drive us into new markets and new challenges. You help shape what we build next.

And to the broader networking community: thank you for the relationships, the collaboration, and the shared operational reality. The open internet and open source software work because people actually collaborate, cooperate, and contribute in the trenches. We’re grateful to be part of that.

Looking ahead: AI, agents, edge inference, and digital borders

We can’t talk about the next phase of the internet without talking about AI.

AI is driving infrastructure demand: more compute density, more bandwidth, more power, and tighter latency requirements. And it’s not just training clusters. It’s inference everywhere. It’s real-time decision-making. It’s workloads that need to be closer to users, closer to data, and closer to the systems they control.

Agents make this even more real. As software becomes more autonomous, the network becomes the connective tissue between services, tools, and decisions. More machine-to-machine traffic. More background transactions. More “always on” dependency.

At the same time, the internet is dealing with a hard truth: digital borders are real. Data sovereignty is not a theory anymore. Companies need the ability to run globally, while also respecting country rules, industry regulations, and internal policies. That means infrastructure that can be consistent across markets, but also localized when required. It means freedom of information moving across borders when it should, and the ability to keep data in-region when it must.

This is exactly the space we’ve been building for: global consistency, real operational control, and an architecture that doesn’t trap customers in someone else’s assumptions.

The next chapter

The more connected we become, the more we can grow as a society. More education. More opportunity. More collaboration across borders, cultures, and communities.

That only works if the infrastructure layer keeps pace.

We’re proud of what the last 10 years built. We’re even more excited about what’s next: expanding the footprint, raising the bar on platform tooling and visibility, leaning into edge inference and AI-era networking, and continuing to build open solutions that give customers real control. We’ll share more about what we’re doing, including the Open Network Edge, very soon. 

In the meantime, we’re still the plumbers. Still in the trenches. Still building the systems that help everything else work. 24x7x365. We’re your partner at the global edge. 

Presence. Forward.

Mark

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