John’s site began many years ago. If you want a date it was…well..er..I think it was around the summer of 1998.

The first ever website was hosted on Angelfire and consisted of Team Fortress Classic information, with the added hint of this unknown Japanese cartoon “Pokemon”. Shortly after this Pokemon hit the big time, you could say my site had something to do with this, but that would be a big fat lie. The site changed to a more evil presence and turned into a site containing free “GuestGear” items such as polls, guestbooks and other useless stuff. The content of the polls varied from, “Who is the best girl in the year?”, “Which country is the best” and “How much do you hate Parish?” This was all done at lunchtimes in Mr Lawmans computer room as I had nothing better to do at the time

The site then “evolved” into something that could be considered useful! It was hosted on a shocking Yahoo! Geocities account. It grew to have a fair few hits and then died again. The second incarnation started a lovely “ginger/orange” colour scheme that lasted for far too long and which I only just got rid of. It’s main feature was a small Guest book which was frequently spammed by people such as Grace and EJ.

I then finished my GCSE’s and started my A-Levels at 6th form. I decided to pursue my website further and went to the expense of buying a domain and webspace! This money fell into the hands of Easily. Ltd and all seemed well till I found out why the deal seemed so good, I had to pay for bandwidth, and at £6/Gb this got expensive quick. I bailed as soon a physically possible. After talking to some friends who run big websites I switched to Oktagone on 25/1/04, the sites content was not down for more than 24 hours. I was impressed!

That said, the site did not return for a few weeks as I redesigned it and worked out what all the new hosting controls did. I then found a hit counter and 1 month later opened the doors on 25/2/04.

Since then the site has been a huge success, it has over 200 photo’s of things that have gone in, which are the main reason people came to the site before the forum. The forum now has 30+ members and over 1000 topics and is the biggest bandwidth hogger. Not that bandwidth is a problem anymore, I get 5Gb a month free, and since February have used over 28Gb of it. Which with Easily would have cost me nearly £170 plus webspace fees. I pay £15 a year. You can see why I switched.

Then it all went tits up. Oktagone forgot to pay there bill for the space they rented in the US. Resulting in thousands of customers websites being unavailable and eventually deleted. Thankfully after about 3 weeks this site is back up but whether I stay hosted at Oktagone is in the balance. They’ve given all there customers 3 months free hosting on top of what we’d paid for, or 3 free months and we can leave, or leave straight away. After a week I was fed up with the poor service and decided to hit the big abort button. Not before I asked Jed who he was hosted on. He pointed me to his friend Peter who runs Foamcow Industries and thus I moved to my new host. He even matched the Price and threw in some deals, all is well.

But such is life, nothing is simple and again in October 2005 things went funky. The forum database decided to delete itself randomly. Luckily I had a backup but it didn’t want to restore. This gave me the kick in the bum I needed to redo the site, again. Its now blog based, purely so I can update it easily. It’s just the default design funked up because I’m getting lazy in my old age. At least I got rid of the orange, man that sucked.

And thats about it!