Founder of HostDudes, a managed node hosting business that runs its customers' nodes on hardware it owns.
Ed Cole is joining Forked.gg as an advisor. He owns and runs HostDudes, a managed node hosting business for people who want to back a network without keeping a server running in the spare room. HostDudes runs its nodes on machines it owns and operates in-house instead of renting capacity from a cloud provider, and it reports hosting more than 1,000 nodes across the networks it supports.
If you spend any time in the Forked Discord, you already know Ed, and this is us making his role with Forked official.
The fleet he built for us
In early July we had the Forked node running on test servers we had rented ourselves. The next question was whether it would hold up on machines we did not own and could not see inside, because that is what the network will eventually run on. Ed sent us one server to try. Once the node came up healthy on it, he sent the other nine, and on 3 July ten HostDudes machines went live across the US, Europe and Asia: two in Los Angeles, plus Atlanta, Zurich, Tokyo, Singapore, Paris, London, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.
Those ten servers have been our test bench ever since. Once an hour the network asks every node to prove it still holds the data it was given, and his machines have been answering that challenge since July. In September they started earning storage credit. Along the way, several of the problems we fixed before opening the test build to the public showed up first on his fleet.
The node test build is open to everyone now, running on ordinary computers in people's homes. Before we were willing to hand it out, the software had to keep working for weeks at a time on servers in data centers that belong to somebody else, and Ed's fleet is where it spent those weeks.
Who he is
Ed came up on the practical side of IT. He has a computer science degree from Mercy University and spent his early career as a systems engineer, running school networks, Wi-Fi, firewalls, web filtering, security cameras and a fleet of Mac and Windows machines. He then spent three years at a web3 gaming company as its customer support lead and lead technical writer, looking after the community through support tickets, Discord and in-person events.
HostDudes, which he has run since 2024, puts both halves of that together. It exists for the person who wants to own a node without learning Linux, opening ports on a home router or waking up when a box falls over. HostDudes does the setup, the updates and the support, so the customer owns the node and Ed's team keeps it online.
What he brings
Some of the people who back Forked will want a node without running the hardware themselves, and that makes hosting providers part of the network in their own right. Ed knows that side of the business from the inside: what a host needs from a node before it can offer it to customers, what goes wrong when you run hundreds of nodes for other people, and what customers ask for when all they want is a node that stays up. He will help us build the node around what operators actually need, and help us bring more hosting providers onto the network.
What comes next
The test build is open to anyone who wants to run it, and everything you need is in our Discord at discord.gg/forked, which is also the easiest place to say hello to Ed.
Welcome aboard, Ed.