The people at and the community around textdrive & joyent was a key part for me being able to learn a ton of stuff online about servers, writing software, good design etc.

Random kind inspiring people on the interwebs (most of whom I never met in person!). Incredible.

edit: also had one of their early "VC" deals for lifetime hosting. Very interesting feeling to have something you don't have to pay for anymore on a monthly basis, inspires to make the most of it. Got a ton of mileage out of it and wasn't upset about it being sunset, by that time hosting was quite cheap already.

edit2: When they started to adopt OpenSolaris I took a closer look and eventually ended up with it as my main desktop system back then & learned about ZFS and dtrace. Magical, fascinating times.