Born in Austin
Way back in 1994 at a kiosk in Barton
Creek Mall, our original (and still) president and vice presidents,
Chad and Elisa Kissinger, introduced a relatively new
thing called the Internet to weekend mall shoppers in Austin. Pitching
$14.95 dial-up access and books on How The Internet Works,
OnRamp Access was born over a 4-weekend period that resulted
in fourteen new customers.
Absent of venture capital funds, angel investments and lottery
winnings, Chad and Elisa hit the limit on their credit cards
and with a small loan from Chad’s partner and father,
Rick, moved the initial OnRamp Access office from their
apartment into a small space in downtown Austin. This included
our first data center which resided in a former barber shop.
Within a year, our Internet backbones quickly began accommodating
dial-up, ISDN and T-1 traffic and the racks in our data
center began filling up with the servers of our co-location customers. Soon a customer’s inquiry about having
a web page designed resulted in Chad, a UT-trained programmer
and self-appointed geek, designing the company’s first
commercial website.
By the end of 1995, we had a full web development department staffed
by graphic artists and multi-language programmers. To date, we have built
over 600 custom websites and applications with an impressive portfolio
of customers. And while this department is autonomous in personnel and
resources from our ISP division, our entire staff works in unison to provide
you this convenient, complete offering of services that go hand-in-hand.
Creating a Spark in San Antonio
In 1996, our service area expanded to the wonderful city
of San Antonio and included a local staff, our own Internet
point-of presence (POP) and an office in the heart of downtown.
Thanks to the support of both San Antonio residential and
business communities we quickly began to establish a growing
base of loyal customers.
And then came the fire.
In an event that would immediately test not only the redundancy
and design of our network, but also the ability of our
staff to respond and remediate an unforeseen downtime crisis
for our customers … our office burned to the ground.
Despite the tragedy that resulted from this successful
arson (we're pretty sure our neighbor's disgruntled employee
wasn't our customer and didn't mean to take us down too),
we had our San Antonio customers rerouted to Austin and
back on the Internet within four hours!
While we have continued providing reliable connections
for our San Antonio customers using this arrangement, we've
done so by maintaining only a sales and support presence
as opposed to a physical office presence.
Glad to Be Here
Today we're happy to say that things are looking bright
for our company. After ten years as a self-supported Internet
company, we're wiser and more stable than we have been
at any time in our history. Sure, we dabbled in some wacky
ideas during the Internet boom, but never in such a way
that compromised our customers or our core business competencies.
In fact, we've benefited greatly from that time period.
Not just in gaining valuable relationships with some fantastic
people that needed our services, but also in the long run
by obtaining our new offices and data center facility (March
2003) for a smidgen of what it cost to build it. We're maintaining
a consistent level of superior customer service that our
customers appreciate in a top-of-the-line facility that
competes with any data center in Central Texas ... and we're
very thankful to be here.
