The History of Stonerocket.net
In The beginning, 2004
It all starts back in August 2004, late one night I was searching for a domain name for a personal website I was planning to start up. It was to be my first ever registered domain and I was going through idea`s in my head, I wanted something original and very easy to remember. I must of spent a good few hours thinking of a domain name to claim my own.
Well heres the funny part, I know some of you know I smoke cannabis on occasions! So on the night I was mildly high “so to speak” and the song RocketMan by Elton John came on my media player and like an epiphany the word StoneRocket popped into my head. So started to search on google about stonerocket and discovered there was nothing much related, In fact virtually nothing at all apart about some rock somewhere in the world.
Realizing that i have found a decent domain that I could use I registered stonerocket.net, I decided that stonerocket.net had a better ring to it than stonerocket.com! Back then I did`nt even know what nameservers where, so you could imagine the fun I had at first getting my first proper website up and running.
The first attempt of stonerocket was a page kit from www.elated.com which at the time I thought it looked rather good, because I already knew HTML quite well back then.
The Beginning of Free Hosting for SR
The only drawback I had back then was the limitations I had with the cheap paid web hosting I had, No PHP or Mysql was available to me which was quite frustrating because that was the next step I wanted to take in my web development.
So it lead me in search of some free web hosting, Which came from a Free Hosting Provider called freenukehosting “sadly no longer around” It was a Post 2 Host provider that offered everything I was looking for in a web hosting package and offered a great community aswell. “much like us now” I learnt a lot in quite a short time while I was there, Even racked up over 1000 post`s on their forums.
But sadly due to money reasons freenukehosting had to close, I was gutted my favourite forums where to shut down in Jan 2005.I met Bondings from FriHost there aswell which at the time I remember he was developing his own site called Crazy-News. He setup Frihost around the same time we started out.
The Free Hosting From Stonerocket was Born, 2005
Feeling I little left out that my favourite community and free hosting provider was gone, I decided to start my own free web hosting community early in 2005 using one of those unlimited resellers you see on Ebay, which was very hard to start up in the beginning due to my lack of knowledge with WMH and providing support for the members. And the fact that using one of those unlimited resellers was meant to be trouble.
So as you could probably guess the most of first year was more down`s than up`s , it was`nt until about summer 2005 when we really started to get going when we got a server and could manage SR a little better, It was`nt without its flaws! the hardest part of getting a free hosting site up and running was gaining new clients. We did the silly thing of offering paid web hosting aswell on the same server as the free hosted clients and to boot we even had our own site hosted on the same server.
Taken from the SR archive - http://www.stonerocket.net/archive/oldsr
That caused problems when the server went down and many headaches for me and staff, but we stuck at it and learned from our mistakes. In 2006 thats when the sun started to shine on us, We had held top spots in many free hosting directories and the traffic started to flood in. We offered a 1gb webspace package which became very popular! So much so the amount of accounts filled our server in months and created more problems. Not to mention a rogue admin who killed the forums, which im not going to talk about. “But hey, nobody said it was going to be easy”
In late summer 2006 I decided to stop offering free web hosting for a while and have a good think about if we were going to continue how we should develop and maintain a steady free service, I talked to many staff members at larger paid & free hosting providers to gain some extra skills, tips and knowledge also while taking a well deserved break.
In november 2006 I did a trail period of providing free web hosting over at SR3 just so that I could prepare myself ready for the relaunch of stonerocket, That`s where I met Blaster one of the SR Admin staff.
A new start in 2007
January 2007 a new year ahead we have a brand new website which I made over the christmas period plus a server in place ready to launch and a whole new prospective on the road ahead, Starting with a better free hosting package much smaller than before of course but will stand the test of time and make it easier to manage. new more experienced staff members with the exception of the odd one.
It did not take long to gain back our reputation as being one of the top free web hosting communities on the web, we have maintained our 98% uptime guarantee all year long.
To be continued…
DJB 