Inside staff side-projects: #2, Rick Mills - ServerAuth

For the second instalment of our series exploring the side-projects run by our talented bunch, we're heading over to our Web Development team to talk to Senior Developer Rick Mills about his project ServerAuth.

With a wealth of Development experience behind him, Rick's blended his day job expertise with a free-time project that dovetails perfectly.

(If you missed the first post, we chatted to SEO Assistant Joe Dickinson about his novelty ecommerce business, Toilet Face, which has earned national news and TV coverage!)

What is your side project, Rick, and how did it start?

ServerAuth is a web-based system that allows you to manage your servers, control who can access them, deploy websites, configure security settings and more.

I started building it alongside my co-founder Mike (who used to work at Evoluted) back in 2018, initially as a way to let you control how and when developers could access servers.

We had some great initial feedback from a few web agencies and software development firms, and this helped shape the path to what ended up becoming a full server management platform, and even more recently rolling out website deployment.

How has working at Evoluted helped your side project?

At Evoluted, I've had the opportunity to serve as one of the go-to people for server-related matters, a responsibility that has deepened my understanding of Linux and system administration.

This hands-on experience has not only enriched my role as a PHP Developer within the company but has also proven instrumental in the development of ServerAuth.

While the company has been incredibly supportive of my professional growth, my side project has primarily been a personal venture, allowing me to explore and implement the server management tools I'm passionate about.

What has been the highlight so far?

It’s been a challenging process to build such a complicated product, and as we’re both doing this in our spare time without a marketing budget, we were naturally skeptical about whether anyone would even know we existed!

However, getting our first few customers shortly after launching was an incredible feeling - to see that we’d created something people wanted to use, and that it was solving a real problem for them has been immensely rewarding.

What are your future plans for ServerAuth?

We spent most of 2023 building out a massive new section to allow people to deploy websites and setup Wordpress at the click of a button.

This year we’re focusing on growing the business and getting these new features into the hands of more people, with the aim of working with more web agencies to help simplify their server management and website deployment processes.