We started using web technologies in
1994 when the modern web was in its infancy. In February
of 1994, Yahoo! had just been started by a couple of
graduate students at Stanford University. Web Crawler
and Lycos were basically the only search engines available.
Developed as research projects, they were crude compared
to what we know today. To host a website, a web designer
would need to have his or her own server and high-speed
connection to the Internet.
During this time period, excitement
about web technologies soared leading designers, developers,
programmers, and IT technicians to collaborate their
efforts and openly exchange what they were learning
and developing without thought of making their "personal
fortunes". Unfortunately, as with other brand new
industries, this energized atmosphere of friendliness
and openness changed significantly as technology advanced
and there was money to be made.
The Internet was becoming a driving
factor in society at large.
Because the high cost of owning a server
and maintaining a high speed connection was prohibitive
for the small business owner, we became heavily involved
in the early research and development of figuring out
how to have a server hold and host more than one website.
The answer lay in the TCP/IP layer (the networking protocol
the Net uses), and in the HTTPD software (the web server
program) itself. We truly were pioneers in developing
technology enabling the "common man" to use
the Internet as an effective communications medium.
Our business attitude has not changed
much since then. We love what we do, and are continually
perfecting our products. The huge growth of the Internet
in the late 90s helped our funding, thus enabling us
to grow using our own money without the use of venture
capital or investor funding. Today, we are still privately
owned, using our own cash flow to finance our operations.
This allows us to have no one to answer to except you,
our clients.
This growth in the late 1990's was an
immense asset to us, it also became a challenge to effectively
handle our booming client base as we took an immense
amount of pride in our product, our relationship with
our clients, and the quality of our services. To ensure
we could offer the same high quality full service our
client base had come to know and appreciate, we actually
limited our growth. This also allowed us to sustain
some resemblance of our quality of life as we were working
as much as 20 hours a day at that point, but we loved
every minute of it due to our close involvement with
the development of Internet and the momentum surrounding
it.
