Shauli Zacks
Updated on: June 13, 2025
SafetyDetectives recently sat down with Nishant Kaushal, Managing Director of Nish Knowledge Factory Instantiated, to learn more about his journey from a teenage coder to a seasoned entrepreneur in the web hosting space. With roots in electronics and a passion for programming nurtured from a young age, Nishant turned an early interest in web development into a full-fledged business—launching SmokyHosts with the help of his grandmother. Today, Nish Knowledge Factory is home to multiple successful brands, including 0frills and OSLogs, serving customers in over 40 countries. In this interview, Nishant discusses the company’s evolution, how it’s staying competitive in a cloud-dominated world, and what’s coming next.
Can you tell us a bit about your background and what led you to start Nish Knowledge Factory Instantiated?
Coming from the background of graduating in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, and more than that, a background of father being an IT professional, so being exposed to programming from almost the age of 12, it was almost destined that I would be making a career in IT, more specifically into programming and system administration.
Having the skills required to code and publish the code to the world wide web, it was obvious, specially during the IT boom, that I felt that every organization must have a website, including my school. That’s where my inclination grew towards web based coding languages rather than computer software. To add to that, PHP was a big fad during those days and LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) was the most popular stack. However, what was lacking was funding. To buy a web hosting package.
But with the skill-set, trust from family members, and being over ambitious, I instead ended up taking monetary help from my grandmom and not only got a webhosting deal, instead got a reseller hosting deal and started SmokyHosts.com – a free web hosting solutions provider, for like minded people, who wanted to create something big on the web and needed a place to host their ideas.
Being a first generation business man from my family, starting Nish Knowledge Factory Instantiated (as the legally operating company behind SmokyHosts) came with its own challenges of learning how to start a company, operationalize it, deal with the policy legalities that comes with local governance and of course, to set it in the path of sustainability and growth. But today, 20 years after starting SmokyHosts, we can proudly say that we have come a long way, with 100s of satisfied customers across 40+ countries across the world.
What makes Nish Knowledge Factory Instantiated — and its brands like SmokyHosts and 0frills — stand out in the crowded hosting industry?
In today’s day and age, where people look at AI for quick answers and have the focus and patience only of a 30 seconds long video, we know that what matters the most is to answer any support requests as quickly as possible. This is one of the biggest thing that the hyperscaler cloud companies or large corporates lack. We continue to maintain a startup culture and continue to offer personal touch to any support request that comes from our customers.
To add to that, our promotions have almost always been organic, through word of mouth, through social media, or through genuine reviews from our own customers. This along with the technical knowledge that we share on our technical blog OSLogs.com, gives our customers the trust that their data is in good hands, in the hands of people who know technology and who know what they are offering.
You launched 0frills in response to rising cPanel license costs. How has that decision shaped your approach to innovation and customer service?
Ever since cPanel was taken over by the investment company Webpros, they completely changed the landscape of the web hosting industry. They moved the pricing of the most popular control panel in the industry, cPanel, from a fixed pricing model to a per account pricing model, and to add to that, they increment the pricing each year. This created a big challenge for brands like ours at SmokyHosts to adapt the same and either absorb the losses or pass on the increase in expense to our customers.
We made the choice, instead, to let our customers make their own decision. The ones who were fine with the premium pricing of cPanel, could continue with cPanel, and for others, we started 0frills.com , which offered Directadmin based web hosting control panel, the next best in the industry.
This decision helped us not only retain the budget sensitive customers, as they were ready to move to 0frills, we could also extend our service offering with Directadmin based web hosting as another choice for existing and new customers.
While starting 0frills, we also wanted to make it different from the rest of the brands in the industry. That’s why we came up with the concept of “0Plan – one plan that fits all needs”. With this, you start with 100GB storage, and we credit 1GB of additional storage to your account absolutely free of cost, each and every month that you continue to host with us. This worked wonders as people saw this as a loyalty benefit, which nobody else in the industry offers!
OSLogs is a niche but useful project — what gap did you see in the market that led you to create it?
To be frank, after being 20+ years in the web hosting industry, we really didn’t find one stop shop where we could find all the knowledge-base about all the available Operating Systems.
Today, when security is of utmost importance, and Operating System releases contain security patches released more often than ever, we needed a place where we can gather this information and share it with our own customers, so they can keep their servers safe, as well as with the rest of the world. This was the biggest idea behind starting OSLogs.com
We plan to share all the details about every Operating System release, gather information about any security breaches that the web admins need to be aware of, as well as share some technical tips in managing your servers and sharing some solutions that we stumbled upon while managing our own servers.
We wanted to bring web admins together in one forum.
From a cybersecurity perspective, what are some of the biggest challenges web hosting providers face today?
DDoS attacks and phishing mails are two of the biggest challenges that we have noticed that keep bothering the web hosting industry.
Although there are multiple ways to mitigate DDoS attacks, both at the network layer as well as at the server level, yet the attackers keep finding new ways to keep attacking. At times the attacks get so complicated, that the only way out remains to physically unplug the network cable from the server. We do ensure that we partner with data centers who have basic DDoS mitigation handled at the network layer itself, yet our admins always remain hands-on, to monitor and mitigate any such attack that still reach our servers.
Speaking about phishing mails, with AI tools being used by the hackers, they are getting more and more creative in sending phishing mails. You can receive a phishing mail in a way that not only a human, but even another AI tool will not be able to figure out, whether it was a genuine or a phishing mail. And unfortunately too many web admins fall prey to this and end up unknowingly sharing sensitive data by clicking on the links in that mail. Firewalls can only do so much as to stop or at least protect from attacks, but phishing mails can pass through firewalls and then it completely lies in the hands of the humans, interacting with these mails, to smartly ignore being tempted to click on the links on them.
What’s next for your company?
As per some studies, the web hosting industry is going to cross $500 billion by 2032. In addition to this, the hyperscaler cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, etc are seeing reduction in the pace of growth, as people are now coming back to traditional web hosting technologies, after tasting the high indirect costs involved in cloud hosting.
All this gives us great opportunities to explore and diversify into many more service offerings.
Recently we started offering IPv6 only VPS, which became a huge success! We will soon be offering storage boxes, which will be priced way below even the cost of your upgraded Google drive, from which we look at the next phase of our growth.
There are many more diversifying ideas in our pipeline, which you’ll keep seeing and hope one day we can have even your data onboard our servers!
