Bitcoin

On July 16, 2010, Pulsed Media posted topic #415 on Bitcointalk offering seedbox hosting for Bitcoin. A seedbox cost 400 BTC per month, roughly $28 at the time. Mt. Gox opened the next day. No earlier hosting company accepting Bitcoin has been found.

History

The Bitcointalk offer (July 16, 2010)

Fifty-five days after Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas (now known as Bitcoin Pizza Day), Pulsed Media founder Aleksi posted three seedbox plans priced in Bitcoin on the Bitcointalk forum. The forum was small enough that his post was thread number 415.

Plan	Storage	RAM	Bandwidth	Price (BTC/month)
Small	115 GB HDD	250 MB	100 Mbps unlimited	400
Medium	230 GB HDD	500 MB	100 Mbps unlimited	500
Large	460 GB HDD	1000 MB	100 Mbps unlimited	850

Volume discounts were offered: 5% for quarterly, 15% for semiannual, and 25% for annual payments. Only four BTC-paid slots were available. Setup was within 48 hours of payment. Each plan included rTorrent with ruTorrent and could also serve as backup storage or a basic shell account.

A forum user named SmokeTooMuch (Legendary Member) replied with a pricing reality check, noting that 995 BTC was worth roughly 50 EUR at the time. He had exchanged 1,000 BTC for about $70 on bitcoinmarket.com. He also asked Pulsed Media to seed the Bitcoin blockchain torrent, since he was its only seeder.

How early this was

Bitcoin barely existed as a tradeable asset in July 2010. The first exchange rate had been set in October 2009 at 1 USD = 1,309 BTC. The first real-world purchase with Bitcoin (the pizza) happened May 22, 2010. Mt. Gox, which would become the dominant early exchange, launched on July 17 or 18, 2010.

Pulsed Media's Bitcointalk post was dated July 16, 2010 and last edited July 17. There was almost no liquid market for Bitcoin and no payment infrastructure for merchants.

For comparison: COIN.HOST, another hosting provider, states it has accepted Bitcoin since 2011. No hosting company found in research claims an earlier start date than Pulsed Media's July 2010 offer.

Payment infrastructure evolution

In a 2013 announcement, Pulsed Media described the progression:

We have accepted bitcoins for years, initially manually then via OKPAY, but now as well via Bitpay for faster and more efficient service.

The full evolution:

2010: Manual processing -- customers sent BTC to a static wallet address, Pulsed Media confirmed receipt and provisioned the service by hand.
~2011-2012: OKPAY integration -- streamlined the payment flow.
April 2013: Bitpay integration -- Bitcoin payments became available directly on invoice views and checkout pages.
CoinPayments -- Bitpay terminated Pulsed Media's account because they sold seedboxes. This was part of Bitpay's broader content moderation policies. Pulsed Media switched to CoinPayments, which is the current cryptocurrency payment processor.

There were no merchant payment tools in 2010. Pulsed Media was processing Bitcoin payments by hand before any of these services existed.

The numbers in hindsight

At July 2010 exchange rates (~$0.07 per BTC), the Small seedbox plan at 400 BTC cost roughly $28 per month. The annual cost at the discounted rate (300 BTC/month) would have been 3,600 BTC for a year of hosting.

The founder's own words

In a 2020 LowEndBox interview, Aleksi stated:

We were probably the first ever hosting business to accept Bitcoin as payment, around the time that famous Pizza was sold. As soon as some exchange rate was established for BTC to EUR/USD we started accepting BTC as payment. You can probably still find the offer posting from Bitcointalk with a little bit of googlefu.

Cryptocurrency payments at Pulsed Media today

The switch to CoinPayments opened up support for multiple cryptocurrencies beyond Bitcoin:

Bitcoin -- the original, accepted since 2010
Monero -- for privacy-focused customers
USDC / USDT -- stablecoins for customers who want to pay in crypto without price volatility
Litecoin
Dogecoin
Ethereum

Bitcoin has been accepted continuously since July 2010.

External links