The Hun: Conquering Online Porn
When The Hun built a link list in 1994, he was simply trying to learn HTML. Today, The Hun's Yellow Pages (
www.thehun.net) is one of the Internet's top destinations for adult link lists, attracting more than 1.3 million unique visitors a day. Users flock to the site for its links to hundreds of pages filled with adult pictures and movies. Adult webmasters flock to the site, too -- getting a page listed on the Yellow Pages can mean tons of traffic and dozens of sign-ups.
Thehun.net is split in to three sections: The Hun's Yellow Pages, a list of links to free images and movies; The Hun's Thumbs-Up, a small TGP; and The Hun's Overflow, a page of galleries not included in the main site because of space constraints.
Together, the sites take up three servers, all of which are co-located in California with Hurricane Electric (
www.he.com). The Hun?s Yellow Pages pull in a whopping three Terabytes of traffic per month. On Sun machines running Apache Web Server, they are connected to Hurricane Electric's backbone.
"They (Hurricane Electric) don't have to do much more than point out where we can hook up the servers," he says. "And of course keep the backbone up. So far they've been doing a great job at that."
Not bad for a site started in 1994 by a kid who had to pay long distance charges just to connect to the Internet. "[Getting online] was a pretty price for a student in the Netherlands at the time," he says.
Aside from creating high-traffic-Web site success, The Hun also became an accomplished programmer. In fact, coding now takes up the majority of his time. He says he spends a lot of time fine-tuning his server's operating system in order keep his sites running smoothly and his expenses down. "It's a lot more cost-effective than going for newer, faster servers," he says. "So we're constantly working on that."
The Hun says one of the biggest challenges in building the site was trying to generate revenue. "In the old days when there were no affiliate programs, it was hard to get sponsors," he says. Since that time, however, advertising has "gone through the roof.? Proof of this, is the size of the waiting list, of advertisers wanting to be on his sites.
With ad sales booming, the Hun?s only challenge now is updating the site with the least amount of overhead. "I run the site pretty much on my own," he says. He did, however, outsource his advertising and sales responsibilities, which are now handled by Florida-based Cybercat Productions (Cybercatinc.com).
When asked about his nickname, The Hun explains: "I was in a demo group at the time, programming 3D rendered graphic animations and stuff," he says. "Everybody was using a handle in those groups, so I had to come up with one myself. That became 'The Hun'."
Although his name is well known, no one online can afford to sleep on an idea. Always innovating, he's currently working on Linkshelf.com, a new site that allows users to access its bookmarks from anywhere in the world. The Hun says he has lots of ideas in the works, but he?s keeping them under wraps for now.
"There are always new ideas," he says. "More ideas than time."
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