Originally Posted by venus

I started my site in 1997, it was around march, initially on the free space you get from your ISP, It was free while I was trying to work out how to run a website, I had no pictures or anything else, just my webcam using Ispy.

I got a phone call and they told me I had to move to a business account that was like 30$ a month or something like that, that did not last long either, back then I used hitbox for my stats and was getting around 60,000-70,000 hits a day.
Someone from my ISP called and said their business account was not for sites like mine but he knew someone who who ran an adult site and had his own server who could help me out, I contacted the guy and he said sure.
what happened was he ended up putting his banners all over my site, then wanted like 30% of what I made from memberships. I said nope and had our own server built that was similar to his, a dual pentium pro 200.
so we turned the spare bed room into an office, out the server in it, had a DS1 (T1) put in and got my site running. the first 12 hours my site was pay I had 158 signups and for about a 9 months it stayed about 100 new joins a day. Not bad for no advertising.
We ended up with 3 DS1's into that townhome and about 5 computers - now have I have three dual 2.66 Xeon systems with 1G of RAM co-located at 2 different data centers.
One is for my website, the others are for video/chat server, mail server and DNS server.