About arkDisk

Our Story

I've been into computers since I was a kid. It was always a hobby — taking things apart, figuring out how they work, building something from nothing. That curiosity led me to study software engineering at a technical university in Poland — database systems, C++, SQL. The foundations that still shape how I think about infrastructure today.

After graduating, I went looking for work in IT. But this was 2005 in Poland — the IT industry was just getting started, opportunities were scarce, and construction offered a much clearer path forward. What started as a temporary move turned into a 20-year career. For 14 of those years I ran my own company, managing projects across multiple disciplines, handling large budgets, and leading teams of dozens of people. I learned to deliver under any conditions, and I learned that hard work isn't something you talk about — it's something you do.

But I never left IT behind. Throughout my entire career, I kept building on the side — websites, Linux servers, virtual machines, my first infrastructure experiments. The idea of running my own server infrastructure wouldn't leave me alone for 20 years. It never went away.

When I started to feel the physical toll of two decades on construction sites, I made the decision to switch to IT completely. Not as a career change — as a return to where I started.

I won't pretend arkDisk reinvents the wheel. The solutions I use are the same ones running in the largest cloud environments — I just deploy them on infrastructure I fully own and control. Because I built everything from scratch in 2025, I had the advantage of starting with the latest enterprise stack from day one — ZFS RAIDZ2 with real-time compression, KVM with full hardware isolation, dedicated OPNsense firewall with dual-WAN failover, Debian stable with hardened kernel. No legacy, no technical debt. Every component chosen for 2026 reality, not inherited from decisions made in 2015.

arkDisk didn't appear overnight — it's the evolution of years of building, testing, and learning what actually works under real load.

Funding

I chose to self-fund from the start. No investors means no pressure to cut corners or chase growth at any cost.

arkDisk is funded entirely from savings I built over 20 years of running a business. Every server, every drive, every switch — paid for with money my family and I earned through years of hard work. No venture capital. No angel investors. No debt.

That changes how you make decisions. When it's your own savings, you don't waste money on hype — you spend it on things that last. Every component in our infrastructure is commercial-grade, selected for long-term durability. I've learned the hard way that cutting corners on critical things always costs more in the end.

Why Nextcloud

I'm realistic — breaking into the cloud market in 2025 is extremely hard. Building everything from scratch would take years and millions I don't have.

Nextcloud gave me a different path. It's a mature, proven open source platform with its own ecosystem, community, and passionate users. EU governments run on it. Universities run on it. It works.

But here's what most people don't realize: Nextcloud is free to download — it is not free to run properly. Making it reliable, fast, and secure for paying customers requires deep system knowledge, constant tuning, and years of experience.

A self-hosted Nextcloud on a Raspberry Pi and a professionally managed Nextcloud for a law firm are two completely different things. arkDisk exists in that gap.

The people

arkDisk is built and maintained by a small group of engineers who've known each other since university — over 20 years. We handle everything ourselves: from kernel updates to customer support. We also work with specialists from technical universities in Lithuania and Poland, bringing in fresh expertise in areas like security auditing and infrastructure automation.

Every one of us has hands-on access to the infrastructure. There are no "managers who don't touch servers" here.

The future

Our next major step: a dedicated server facility in Poland.

• Architect engaged, site secured
• Permits in progress
• Planned completion: end of 2027

Three European locations (Belgium, Lithuania, Poland), fully owned, fully independent. That's the goal.

— Christopher
Founder, arkDisk