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.

2008 Keeps the Ball Rolling

2008 was a good year for Stonerocket.  We came out with a new website design which was worked on by our staff for over a mouth before launching it a couple of days before the start of 2008.

The old design looked like the following

After we set the new template in place for the site we updated the pages and did some little work around it. We did our best to make it SEO friendly so that we could get more users to use our services.

In 2008 we also had some problems with people abusing the mail features with there accounts. Therefore we made the decision to not allow people to use webmail anymore. Instead we suggest to them that they use google aps version instead.

We also decided on installing Ruby on Rails. However halfway through the year we switched hosts and decided that the lack of users using it that we wouldn’t bother reinstalling it. We also became the first free host to allow FFMPEG hosting. This allowed our users to create there own youtube clone websites. However with the vast amount of people abbusing it we decided to due away with it. We plan on setting something up however for valid customers to be able to get this in the future.

In 2008 we also gained some new staff members and had some promotions. Hazem was bumped up from the Moderation team to the Administration team. Since we did this we needed a new moderator so the team decided on SpitsBeaT. SpitsBeaT also helped out by becoming an Account Creator.

We also fixed little odds and ends up around the site. We fixed some minor bugs in the Awstats. We also did the same with some minor bugs in the cash mod we had installed. We also deleted unused accounts on our free hosting server through our quarterly account clean up.  We do this to try and keep the server used for people that actually use there accounts. We also boosted up our server to accommodate for more users using our free hosting. PHP was also recompiled due to some users having problems with it.

In 2008 we also decided to start using Fantasitco. Before we had used another script installer but this was giving us problems therefore we decided to switch.

2009 And some big Changes

In the beginning of 2009 we decided to come out of the dark ages of forums. We finally made our switch from phpbb2 to phpbb3. un4saken worked hard setting up the forum and modding it before we did the switch. Many of the mods on it are done custom by un4saken. With this new design and forum we decided that we need a new set of rank images as our other ones are old. Therefore we decided to set up the Sr Competitions. With these competitions we  decided to give the winners a free .info of there choice. Another competition we set up was hit your vidiclip. Vidiclip was set up in late 2008 and is a video hosting site sort of like youtube. The winner of that competition was un4saken.

To be continued…

DJB