STORY CONTINUED

Yeah, so where was I? Well, I sat on the domain for a few months, perhaps two or three. The big thing was finding out what I’d do for hosting. Most of the plans I saw were about $20 US a month, for around 30 Mb of storage space.

Back then, I thought that was a lot of money for something that I had potentially no audience for. Around the spring time or so, I had a chance conversation with a friend Jason Grant. Jason kept a Linux box on the Internet, maintained his own domain, and hosted a few others. I mentioned how I had a domain but had no hosting. He graciously offered to host my site, give me e-mail usage, and also lots of storage space. All at no cost.

Once that was done, I began building my pages. It was really simple at first. I can’t even remember what it looked like. There were maybe two pages initially. I gradually built it from there, adding on pages and trying new things. Traffic was sparse to say the least. I think I’d get perhaps two visitors a month!

I’d tell people my new e-mail address and web site, but very few people caught on. The first time I had a major spike in traffic was when one of the guys over at plantfortress.com linked to my site on their main news page. I had helped them write a small article on a game, and they publicly thanked me. I was so surprised when I saw the server logs that day. Twenty visitors in one day! Ha ha ha…

Fast forward to the present and twenty visitors a day isn’t out of the ordinary any more. I’m still glad whenever people visit, but it’s nice to know people are finding my site everyday.

So, that’s the abbreviated story of erwintang.com.