Getting onto the net

radiocurly.com was set up before I had internet access. I would go down to my friend's place (Roy) and download files from his computer to the server that he had set up for me. I would design my site at home, make changes and then go down to Roys, upload files and slowly work on the task of uploading all of our songs. Then I could start on uploading the videos.

Each song was taking about five minutes to upload, or about an hour per album. It was a long process, but eventually I managed to upload 90% of our songs and began to upload a few video clips. Then one day . . . the server just wasn't there anymore. It had gone. It came back briefly, but then isappeared for ever.

By this time I had managed to get an internet account of my own and quickly managed to set up another server, with another friend (John). This was the start of chrisloft.com - but this server was limited in size - I only had 5 gigabye of space. This was enough to store our mp3 files, but not our video files.

I then began a search for 'free' internet hosting services - and in quick succession signed up for dozens, and dozens of them. Soon we had over one hundred internet sites and we began wiritng web pages for them at a furious pace. This was a great learning process, I could already write a little bit of html code, but soon I found myself learning about php, asp, xml, xpsf, xhtml, java, jsp and a few other new programming languages.

 

Staying on the net

radiocurly.com had been taken out by hackers, at least that was the general feeling. Moving all of the files onto chrisloft.com was only a short-term solution. With a myriad of internet sites at our disposal we set up the task of building a distributed network of sites all over the internet. The logic behind this was that if we kept all of our files in one place, then we were still vulnerable if the server went down again. Now we were able to spread our web pages and duplicate our content if we felt like it. Sometimes we set up sites that were identical copies of other sites - just as a backup.

t was a lot of hard work putting all these sites up and keeping them maintained. In a lot of cases a bare-bones skeleton was set up, with plans to return 'soon'. In other cases templates were hastily modified and then published, complete with ipso facto text in some places. Some 'free' internet hosting services were better than others. Some were terrible, or slow, or had file restrictions, low bandwidth limits, too many ads, too many pop up ads, too much spam. . . .

Soon our research led us to some hosting services that offered a reasonable space at a reasonable price and we signed up for larger hosting account. We also managed to set up some reseller accounts so that from now on we could provide our own hosting for our artists, bands and clients. We are now able to offer a broad range of internet hosting opitions - ranging from our own 'free' hosting service, to premium accounts, large amounts of server space, clusteered servers; in fact just abou any feature that you might require.

Now we were in a position to store all of our mp3 files in one place; all of our movie files in another - and we could access this data from any web site that we created. Gradually we began to reorganise our web sites and minimise our reliance on 'free' hosting services and establish a network on 'our own' sites. This added curlyhost.com and curlyhosting.com to our stable of 'dot coms'. Soon we added intergalactichost.com to give us even more space. (At this time we also registered intergalacticidol.com so that we could promote a competition for a forthcoming website.)

We have one more step in our hosting plans - and that is to sign up for a service that gives us a terabyte of server space (that's a thousand gigabytes) - that should be sufficient for most of our immediate needs. We hope.

<< previous page <<