He tried to retire. Then he became a customer.
FXRM was founded in 2025 by Jon Morby. He had already sold his ISP, bought a boat and stopped being responsible for anybody’s email at three in the morning. Buying hosting like everybody else is what brought him back.
It started with a boat.
Jon sold FidoNet Registration Services in June 2019 and did the sensible thing. He bought a boat, started a YouTube channel and stopped carrying a pager. For the first time since 1985 he was on the other side of the counter — an ordinary customer, buying hosting, DNS and mailboxes from other people’s companies at ordinary prices.
It was worse than he remembered. Not slower, not dearer — worse. Support that answered from a script. Control panels that hid the one setting you needed. DNS changes that took a working day and a ticket. Mail that failed alignment silently, with nobody at the far end who could explain why, or who knew what alignment was. Every one of those is a solved problem. He knew, because he had spent decades solving them.
Most people grumble and renew anyway. Engineers don’t grumble at a broken system — they take the lid off. FXRM is what happened when he took the lid off.
Before the internet, there was FidoNet
From 1985
Long before any of that, there was a modem and a phone bill.
This was the DOS era — before Windows, before TCP/IP was something you could simply buy. From 1985 Jon was running FidoNet nodes: the global network of bulletin boards that enthusiasts built because nothing else existed. He became one of the main importers of echomail and netmail into the UK from the United States and across Europe, and he ran the whole thing on a non-profit basis, because that was the point of it. When the phone bills became frightening he found UUCP and used it to batch mail more cheaply — which is how a generation of British engineers learnt store-and-forward messaging: by paying for it personally.
Everything FXRM does with mail descends from that. Queueing, retries, routing, the difference between a message that bounces and a message that quietly vanishes. That isn’t a certification he sat. It’s a bill he paid.
Then Britain came online, all at once
1992 – 1997
In 1992 the internet was arriving in Britain as something ordinary people could buy, and for most of them it arrived through Demon Internet. Cliff Stanford, Demon’s managing director, already knew what Jon had been doing on FidoNet, and brought him in.
He did not give up the day job. He was working on the floor of the Birmingham Stock Exchange as a broker, and did both at once. When Demon needed a Birmingham Point of Presence in 1993, it went into his living room. For a while, a meaningful share of the Midlands’ access to the internet ran through a rented flat, maintained by a stockbroker in his own time.
It took until 1995 for the side project to win. He moved to London, left broking, and went full time.
That same year he started something else that would outlast the job: fido.net. It is a different thing from FidoNet, and borrows the name deliberately — FidoNet was the amateur bulletin-board network he had been part of since 1985; fido.net was his own, built to carry that community across to the internet as the BBS world wound down. Stanford, who might reasonably have objected to an employee running a side operation in the same business, instead encouraged it and had Demon sponsor its internet gateway. He knew exactly what he had.
Across all of it — FidoNet, Demon, fido.net — the job never actually changed. It was always shipping mail: netmail and echomail first, then email.
Technical support led to operations, and operations led to the whole of Demon Mail: every mailbox, every queue, every delivery, for more than 100,000 paying customers — at a moment when there was no operational playbook for running mail at that scale in the UK, because nobody in the UK had yet done it. By 1997 he was in senior management as Advanced Technologies Manager, shaping the systems the company would be running for years afterwards. He left once Demon was sold to Scottish Telecom, now Thus plc.
A hundred thousand mailboxes teaches you something no documentation will: mail is not a feature. It’s an operational discipline with a pager attached.
Where failure has a price in pounds
Late 1990s – early 2000s
Interactive Investor International was a trading start-up, which is a polite way of saying it was a website where mistakes cost real money in real time. Jon was responsible for the site and the internet trading systems behind it across the UK, Hong Kong and South Africa — live share dealing through to stock alerts, three jurisdictions, and no acceptable window in which to be down.
Then Cliff Stanford rang again. Stanford’s new company was Redbus Interhouse, and Jon joined the PLC as Head of European Operations, running fourteen data centres across nine countries, each one its own operating company — the floor underneath everybody else’s floor, where you learn exactly how infrastructure that "just works" actually fails. Power. Cooling. Cross-connects. People.
It was a good job. It wasn’t the job. Something was missing, and he knew what it was.
Full circle, and fewer than twenty customers
2001 – 2019
What was missing was customers of his own. He went back to fido.net and found it very nearly dormant: fewer than twenty of them.
Just over twelve months later, there were more than a thousand.
Not through funding, and not through advertising. Through doing the dull things properly, plus a handful of decisions that looked eccentric at the time. He put spam and virus filtering in front of every customer’s mail years before the industry treated either as standard, and was asked more than once why he was bothering. His customers spent the following years receiving virtually no spam and staying happily virus-free, which turned out to be a reasonable answer. Then came own-domain email for people who wanted a real address rather than a free one, then web hosting, then domains, then the rest of a proper B2B ISP.
He ran it that way until he sold the company in June 2019 — and went looking for that boat.
"It just goes to show that money and flash programming can get you so far, but without a solid background in the business, you’re just another wannabe."
— Jon Morby, 2003
FXRM isn’t a pivot. It’s the conclusion.
2025
Which brings us back to the boat.
FXRM exists for an unglamorous reason: the things Jon had taken for granted at fido.net had become difficult to buy. Hosting you can reason about. DNS that changes when you change it. Email that arrives. Somebody on the telephone who understands the answer rather than reading it out.
So FXRM owns its stack instead of reselling somebody else’s. Enhance, Zimbra, Proxmox, PowerDNS, HAProxy, Postfix, Dovecot — all operated by our own engineers, which is why an odd DMARC failure or a mail routing conflict gets diagnosed rather than escalated. It’s UK-owned and UK-operated, with no American parent company and no investors whose returns have to be weighed against your uptime. Support is engineers, not a triage tier. DKIM, DMARC, SPF and PTR are configured correctly on the way in, rather than sold back to you as an add-on once something breaks. There is a phone number, and a real address in Portland, Dorset.
None of that is innovation. It is simply what hosting looks like when the people building it have recently been customers themselves and can still remember how that felt.
UK hosting built by engineers who’ve been doing this since 1992. That isn’t a slogan somebody workshopped. It’s a description.
The short version
The same job since 1985, under a series of different names.
| Period | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1985 | FidoNet | Running nodes and importing echomail and netmail into the UK from the US and across Europe, non-profit, in the DOS era. UUCP to move the mail and keep the phone bills survivable. |
| 1992 | Demon Internet | Brought in by managing director Cliff Stanford — whilst still working as a broker on the Birmingham Stock Exchange. In 1993 Demon’s Birmingham Point of Presence was installed in his living room. Went full time in 1995. |
| 1995 | fido.net founded | His own ISP, distinct from the FidoNet network whose name it borrows. Set up to carry the BBS community onto the internet, run alongside the Demon job with Cliff Stanford’s blessing. |
| 1995 – 1997 | Demon Mail — 100,000+ customers | Responsible for the entire Demon Mail system, then promoted into senior management as Advanced Technologies Manager. Left after the sale to Scottish Telecom, now Thus plc. |
| Late 1990s | Interactive Investor International | Website and internet share-trading systems across the UK, Hong Kong and South Africa. Real-time dealing and stock alerts, where downtime has a price in pounds. |
| Early 2000s | Redbus Interhouse | Head of European Operations for the PLC, running fourteen data centres across nine countries, each its own operating company — with Cliff Stanford again. |
| 2001 – 2019 | fido.net | Back to fewer than twenty customers, and past a thousand inside twelve months. Spam and virus filtering years ahead of the industry, own-domain email, web hosting, domains — a proper B2B ISP. Sold in June 2019. |
| 2019 – 2025 | Retirement, briefly | A boat, a YouTube channel, and six years as an ordinary customer of the services he had spent his career building. It did not take. |
| 2025 | FXRM | UK-owned hosting, email and DNS on infrastructure FXRM runs itself, supported by the engineers who run it. |
What any of that has to do with your hosting
History is only worth telling if it changes what you get. Here is where it does.
- Mail is not an add-on. Demon Mail, fido.net, Zimbra. Deliverability gets treated as an infrastructure problem here because it always has been one.
- We own the stack. Nothing white-labelled from somebody else. When it breaks, the person you reach can see below the application layer.
- Engineers answer. No tier-one triage. The people who built the platform are the people on the other end of the phone.
- UK-owned, UK-operated. No US parent, no VC backing. Infrastructure decisions get made for technical reasons.
- Migrations don’t frighten us. Postfix or Exim, cPanel reseller or bare metal — whichever stack you are leaving, we have almost certainly run it.
- Built for the long run. FXRM is a new company. It is not a first attempt. Nobody here is learning this on your domain.
That’s the whole premise.
Hosting run by the people who helped build the thing it runs on — and who went away long enough to remember what it feels like to be the customer. If that sounds like the sort of company you’d rather buy from, come and talk to us.
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