By 2000, Exodus was worth about $32 billion for renting out floor space. Its Internet Data Centers were secure, air-conditioned buildings full of other companies' servers, wired straight into the internet's main lines. If you ran a busy website, you did not want your servers in a closet down the hall. When Exodus filed to go public in early 1998, the web was growing faster than companies could build places to host it.

Two Engineers and a Server Room

K.B. Chandrasekhar and B.V. Jagadeesh founded Exodus in 1994. That October it began selling internet connections to businesses. It soon found a better product: hosting. Exodus built data centers with backup power, cooling and fast links to many networks, and charged customers to keep their machines there. The bet was that every serious website would need a professional home. Exodus built a chain of those buildings and tied them together with its own backbone network.

Thirty-Two Billion, Then Chapter 11

Exodus priced its shares at $15 in March 1998 and listed on Nasdaq as EXDS. As the web boomed, so did the stock, and the company kept building. In September 2000 it agreed to buy Global Crossing's hosting unit for $6.5 billion in stock. By the January 2001 closing, that stock was worth $1.95 billion. Dot-com customers were failing, and many stopped paying. Exodus filed for Chapter 11 in September 2001, and Cable & Wireless bought its assets.

Cover: The Submersion of Pharaoh's Army in the Red Sea, Titian. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for the Exodus story, the Red Sea closing.