Banks and trading firms could not afford to wait in the public internet's traffic jams. Savvis sold them a way around: private networks and data centers that carried business traffic out of sight. When Savvis filed to go public in early 2000, it was closely tied to Bridge Information Systems, a financial data company. Many investors thought infrastructure was the safest place to put internet money.

Skipping the Crowded Exchanges

Savvis bet that businesses would pay a premium for a managed network that avoided the congested public exchange points. It routed traffic over its own backbone. It ran the data centers where customers placed their servers. The business needed a lot of capital up front. It rested on one assumption: demand for bandwidth and hosting would rise fast enough to fill all that capacity.

Surviving Bridge's Collapse

Savvis priced at $24 a share in February 2000. The telecom bust that followed nearly broke it. Then Bridge went bankrupt in 2001 and added more strain. Savvis survived. It bought assets from failed rivals and grew into a major hosting and early cloud provider. In 2011 CenturyLink bought the company in a deal worth about $3.2 billion, including debt.

Cover: Factory Building with Chimney Construction, Unknown. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a factory chimney under construction (industrial infrastructure).