Going Live... (2000)

They first thing I needed before I could go live with my new site was a real server. My 700 mhz Dell with 256 MB RAM was just not going to cut it. Actually, the real bottleneck was my high-speed internet provider (Time Warner). They capped upload speeds back then to limit folks from running servers on their home PCs. I did some research and found a Canadian company that offered affordable LAMP packages with the modules I needed (LAMP -> Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP). I signed up.

The move to the new server was not trivial since this was my first time working with many of these modules. Took a few days, but the server was finally ready!

Next step, I needed to find a way to get the word out. From the other sites I had been researching, I noticed they all did frequent "press releases" to announce any little change or new feature. After reading up on press releases, it sounded like a good way to kick start my new site.

Modeling my release after some templates I found online, I drafted my first press release. I used Internet Wire, which was a pretty decent service back then. They proof read my release and made some suggestions for improvements. The content of my release focused on differentiating my site from any of the current sites/services out there. I wanted it to stand out to any news agencies that might pick my story up.

The press release was a big success. My story got picked up by a few mid-sized papers across the country, and a few big web news sites. With the coverage came a few good inbound links. Back then I had no idea about SEO, inbound links, keywords and all that. I was just happy to see visitors in my log files and new content being created on the site.

Traffic evened out after that first press release but remained steady. I was officially in business!

Next up... The Business Plan...