web hosting nostalgia, pt.1
Sigh... do you remember back when Geocities was cool?
I had several Geocities sites over the years (those years being 1996-1998). I can't even remember what the addresses were, or even what I put up on those sites exactly. Though I do remember using one for a school project once. They used to have a "Neighborhood" concept going where you would choose a themed neighborhood and then you would be assigned a numerical "address" in that neighborhood. The URL for your site was made up of geocities.com, the neighborhood name, and your address number. It was actually kind of a neat concept. The service was free, so there was ads integrated into all your web pages hosted at Geocities, and if I remember correctly, you were allowed only a limited number of pages and a rather small bit of disk space on their server.
Geocities is now owned by Yahoo, and it appears that the neighborhoods may have given way to new developments.
It was 1998 and Geocities was decidedly less new and exciting. The ads became more numerous and the service suffered as more people signed up for free hosting. In early October I decided I just had to register my own domain name. I remember staying up all night one night feeding potential names, one after another, into the form at Network Solutions, trying to come up with the perfect domain name. I knew I wanted something short. [Unregistered] four letter domain names where much less rare at that time. In the not so early hours of the morning (the sun was coming up by the time I made my decision) It cost me $70 for a two-year registration.
So I had a domain name, but I still needed a host. At the time I was a Netcom dial-up subscriber, so I looked at their web-hosting services and signed myself up. This was of course before the proliferation of super-cheap-and-generous-hosting-for-all, so what I actually got was a business targeted web hosting package, that cost me $60/month. I don't recall how much disk space or bandwidth sixty bucks bought back then but I know it wasn't much. The site was hosted on a unix server of some sort, as almost every web host was running unix then.
I made a foray into web development, armed with nothing but basic HTML knowledge and a couple books on web design. My first website consisted of just one page with some cloud images in the background, and some forgettable text I added. For a while I ran a email-postcard service, which was actually just a link to a big provider of such a service, who branded the site as your own. Besides the worthless homepage, I made some other pages on my site, mostly in the spirit of experimenting and learning web development and design. The tools I employed at this time were Adobe Photoshop and windows' notepad.exe.
After less than a year I decided I could no longer pay $60/month to host my pathetic website. I went shopping for a new host and ended up at ValueWeb. This was a good move because the service level was comparable and I saved a lot of money. I believe the new service cost me around $35/month. This was also a unix-based hosting service, which allowed me a little more disk space and bandwidth than Netcom had.
Just before the first birthday of my domain name, I was received a phone call, out of the blue, from an up-and-coming satellite-based ISP based in Colorado. I entered a state of shock. They explained that they wanted to offer me $1500 for my domain name. I had registered the domain a year earlier only because I thought it was cool, not because I ever dreamed that someone would want to buy it from me. Fifteen hundred dollars was a lot of money to me then, and that someone was offering me that money for something that cost me seventy dollars the year before was simply unbelievable. I mean, I liked the domain, but I sure wasn't getting fifteen hundred bucks of satisfaction out of it. I was all ready to take the money and run, and it felt like a dream; too good to be true.
And so began a truly surreal moment if my life. For the very next day I received another phone call regarding my domain. This person was based somewhere on the east coast, but she was representing a client who also wanted to purchase my domain. I told her about the other offer and she quickly topped it with a $3000 offer to purchase the domain. More phone calls, more negotiations; a bidding war had erupted. I was absolutely crazy during all of this. I flip-flopped between uncontrollable excitement and severe disbelief.
Approximately 72 hours later I nervously signed and faxed a document confirming the sale of my domain to the ISP that had initially contacted me. Shortly thereafter, Fedex delivered to me an envelope containing the check which completed the deal. It was my own little piece of what would be known at the dot-com bubble. I had just received nine thousand dollars for an intangible piece of property; a name in a computer; four letters and a suffix.
