Similar memories and tales here :) I had a 100Mbit unfiltered connection in my dorm room in 2001 (!). Pretty wild for the time. I guess it took until about 2018 before I finally surpassed that speed at home. Nuts really.
Lots of pirating but also, thanks to it having a public static IP, a fabulous way for me to learn all about running and configuring my own web server, irc server, mail server, dns server, ftpd etc. etc. It was my gateway into experimenting with linux, discovering luminaries like DJB & RS, learning about RFCs, appreciating the open source/free software movement and probably a major reason why I ended up on a sysadmin/ops/infra trajectory after uni that still serves me well to this day.
Yeah I started and sold a web hosting company around that time based on the skills I picked up with all those things. I didn’t host it from my dorm but just commodity servers with a shared hosting app installed. If I remember correctly I had about 5000 users and sold because I didn’t want to hire help when it started to encroach a bit too far into my leisure time.
A few of my customers were running legit and decent sized businesses and they had no idea it was being hosted by a college kid who actually wasn’t even monitoring things all that much. When I encountered a problem I couldn’t figure out from searching the internet, I’d usually just write some script and cron job to restart the service periodically. It also served as my everything (nameservers, support, e-mail, etc) so I remember one time there was a fire in my data center and it went down for about 36 hours. I had no way to communicate with my customers and the site was unavailable. Luckily I think only about 10 customers even noticed.
Lots of pirating but also, thanks to it having a public static IP, a fabulous way for me to learn all about running and configuring my own web server, irc server, mail server, dns server, ftpd etc. etc. It was my gateway into experimenting with linux, discovering luminaries like DJB & RS, learning about RFCs, appreciating the open source/free software movement and probably a major reason why I ended up on a sysadmin/ops/infra trajectory after uni that still serves me well to this day.