Anno Internet Ltd is incorporated in the province of British Columbia, Canada. But our beginnings were on the other side of the globe.
In the beginning…
Back in 1996, having a website or email for your business was still a rarity. In July of that year, Jacques Pienaar and Johannes Grobbelaar were discussing business opportunities over a meal in Pretoria, South Africa. They sensed that the Internet was much more than a passing fancy. They saw the potential; Anno Internet was born.
Our beginnings were humble: we rented a handful of web accounts with 20 MB storage spaces (an awesome amount of storage for the day) and resold that to local businesses. Our service gradually expanded to more sophisticated reseller hosting plans and eventually dedicated servers and cloud services. Today ANNO has a network of web servers spread over three continents.
Want a laugh? A snapshot of our website taken in 1998 is available on the Internet Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/19980110143807/http://www.anno.com/
Establishing the Canada office
The founding partners have since moved on to other business ventures. And Anno Internet has moved on too, literally. In 2003, we moved our office to British Columbia, Canada. Under the helm of Stephen Pienaar (President), our business got a more international flavour. We continue to maintain a close connection to our South African roots with more than half of new clients still coming from the Rainbow Nation.
Clients are people, not numbers
We have succeeded in adding many small and medium-sized businesses to our client list, some of them well-known in their respective communities. We are also providing white-label web hosting to resellers around the world.
Why do we have “clients” and not “customers”? Because we do more than just sell a commodity; we provide a professional service and treat our clients with the courtesy and respect they deserve.