Call this 6 months?
It was around the beginning of October when I organically registered this domain. Six months of ConnorWilson.com. Though the monthly archives may only date back to January 13th, that was only beginning of this ‘era’ so to speak, and it was the second WordPress era as well. I think this is a good time for a history lesson 
In hindsight, this is going to be extremely long. This will be a series of 3 or 4 posts, which will still have a considerable length. Here’s part one: The Free Hosting Era.
The Free hosting era. (Early 2005? - ~September 2006).
We all have to start some where, right? Not much good came out of this era, but this is where it all either began or started developing. I remember when shopping around for a free host was so important. Hosting, free or paid, has always seemed to be a big issue for me, and especially choosing a host. I eventually settled (keyword there) on 95mb, which I believe are now out of business, or gone… From what I remember, the plan had some pretty nifty features:
- 95mb of Disk Space
- FREE Web FTP!
- No PHP, PERL, CGI, etc…
- Only HMTL files.
- Couple MB of bandwidth?
This hosting was sooo bad that I was running up to like 10% bandwidth usage from only me visiting and updating things. Back then I didn’t actually *know* what blogging was, or how to do anything, for that matter. I designed this slick (back then) green and black layout, which unfortunately I couldn’t find, and on my Web FTP app, I would update every single page with little ‘blog posts’. Actually, thinking about that now, I remember dating those posts with April, but I don’t quite remember if it was 2006 or 2005.
After that I found my last free host of whom I would grace their servers for quite a while. It was a ‘apply and get accepted’ deal back when I was using them, but now it’s a ‘apply and get accepted and post on our forums’ deal now. That host was: PO.GS. How cool is that? Pogs! Anyways…
I don’t remember the exact specs, but I was loving the short domain.That actually reminded me of an even darker era, of which I will get into after this, even though it was chronologically before. So here’s what they offer now, but it can’t be that different:
- yourname.po.gs!!!
- 50MB of web space (all yours)
- 1GB of monthly transfer
- A mailbox and an autoresponder!
However!
This comes at a cost! No money, but there’s strings! Firstly, you must link back to the PO.GS home page! Secondly, your site must be in English! How do you apply? Oh, just go to their site and put your email in the form.
So, now for the aforementioned ‘darker’ era. Thinking about this now, it actually dates back to 2003. Long time, eh? Well, this entire portion of an era, which is more of an era unto itself can be summed up in two links!!
It’s funny, as now I would totally shun those two sites (and do… shunnnnn!) but they are what really started me onto the path that would eventually lead me here… to this blog post… What led me to that, however was pretty simple, and I’ll dip into that before moving on.
When I first got the internet, a long time ago (tempted to say… 1998?) I was so fascinated that I didn’t want to reinstall these awesome games to fix them because it might hurt the internet. Even more sidetracking now, but only for a second. My first web site I eversaw on my own internet connection: TSN.ca (Canadian sports equivalent to ESPN).
Back on track (kind of)! So with the internet, my first encounter with HTML was like an HTML 2.0 lesson or something on how to create your first web page. I had a very diffivult time remembering the entire <html>…<head>….<body>… thing, and after a day or two quickly gave it up. All that must’ve been foreshadowing right?
So now back onto the entire Freewebs (shudder) thing. Using the basic (never advanced ;)) service, I set up web pages for hockey pools, personal things, etc… and eventually I wanted to buy a domain. So I got $10 all gathered up and sent Freewebs and email asking them this (paraphrased):
Instead of $5 USD, can I mail you $10 CAD to pay for the premium service?
Snail mail! Unfortunately, I never got that response. Bastards! But I continued to use Freewebs then fantastic service to humanity. Enter DOT.TK. The Freewebs URLs were a hassle to type in, and with my long descriptive titles it only made it worse. So, I had tons of different Freeweb hosted sites, running the .TK domain.
I had the .TK thing going so early that I was never apart of the ads they force on you, or any of the bad stuff they put on your site now. Free. No banner, link, ads, nothing. It was great. They even had stats and crappy geo targeting too!
But, all good things must come to an end, and as the things I was making crappy ass free websites about started to not interest me, I slowly faded away from a budding web development… something. What happened after this was a whole lot of nothing for a very long time. Insert a space of a couple of years, then insert the 95mb part and onwards.
So that concludes part one, but look out for these other parts to come in the following days!
- My First domain and paying for hosting! (June 2006? - September 2006)
- Pause once again? Thanks ServerSeed… (September 2006 - October 2006)
- DreamHost Era Begins! (October 2006 - Present)
Hopefully this isn’t boring anyone. I’ll try to mix in some regular posts with this stuff as well!
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