Three engineers who started by fixing their own hosting bill.

Saurabh grew up in Mumbai taking apart whatever the household would let him: a transistor radio, the television remote and, once, the family computer, which went back together with a single screw left over and worked perfectly. He chose computer engineering because it looked like the shortest route from taking things apart to building things that mattered.

At Atharva College of Engineering he found the campus technology community that already called itself Design & Code, and a steady stream of websites to build for friends, clubs and small businesses. One evening in 2018 he opened a spreadsheet and listed every domain and server the community was paying for, what each one cost, and what a fair price would look like. The gap was hard to ignore. In October 2018 it became Hosting Seva, plain-spoken hosting from ₹49 a month.

Running a hosting company as a student was a crash course in business. A monthly invoice is an honest thing: customers stay only while you keep earning them. When the three founders incorporated Desicode Infosolutions LLP in May 2019, Saurabh took the parts nobody else was queueing for: pricing, proposals, contracts and the commercial model. He still writes every proposal himself.

Today he leads strategy and technology. He is usually the first person a client speaks to, often at the moment they know something has to change but have not yet decided what the product should be. He shapes the business case and the architecture side by side, because a strategy that cannot ship on the budget available is only a wish. He led the accounts for Made By Bharat, Mahindra MILU and the IVCA member platform.

His obsession is page one. Every engagement run on the Ampersand Method opens with Listen & Learn, and it does not move on until the problem fits in two sentences that everyone in the room would sign. Colleagues have watched him spend a whole morning on the verbs. The weeks it saves later are the reason he does not apologise for it.

In Hosting Seva's first year somebody had to run the servers and answer the support desk. That was Suraj. He learned DNS, backups and SSL certificates at two in the morning with a customer waiting on the line, which is a demanding way to learn anything and a very effective one.

The lesson that stayed came on a Sunday in that first winter, when a small shop's security certificate expired and its checkout began warning every visitor away. It took twenty minutes to fix and a week to stop thinking about. Since then every certificate, domain and backup he is responsible for has a named owner and a date in a calendar. He came out of that year with a lifelong allergy to surprises.

Today he leads engineering and delivery: architecture reviews, DevOps, quality, security, releases, and the care plans that keep client products healthy long after launch. Hosting Seva's infrastructure still reports to him. He led the Ekeeda cloud move, run over a single weekend from a paper checklist of 64 steps in his own handwriting, and the retail POS and ERP integration that put 14 stores on one inventory.

His idea of a good launch is one nobody remembers. Go-lives are rehearsed twice, the rollback plan is written before the release plan, and everyone knows who does what at every hour of the night. He still takes a turn on the support rota each month, because the quickest way to find a weak spot is to be the one who answers the phone about it.