http://www.indyramp.com as of December 1996 (earliest archive.org entry)

Eighteen years ago today, my registration for indyramp.com went through.

Creation date: 03 Jul 1995 04:00:00

The next day, as I recall, the Network Solutions $100 registration charge for two years of service went into place. It later decreased, and my domains moved from Network Solutions to Joker.com (requiring a fax to Germany to confirm), to a friend’s OpenSRS/Tucows RSP, to GoDaddy, and finally to its current resting place at Namecheap.

Indyramp Consulting had been around a bit before that, originally designed to be a third Internet Service Provider in Indianapolis, Indiana. In those days, it still wasn’t completely insane to seriously consider introducing an ISP that didn’t offer SLIP or PPP connections. Anyway, that plan didn’t quite work out, and I took a job at one of the other two ISPs, IQuest, which is now called LightBound.

But I kept the Indyramp name around, registered the domain, and set up a couple of web sites on it–including my earliest claim to fame, the pop music page (and first Internet fan page of any sort) for Alyssa Milano.

In 1995, I had a dedicated dialup connection from IQuest (an employee perk), and hosted much of my site on a recased Gateway 2000 i386 PC with 16MB of DIP RAM on a riser board and a 540MB hard drive that dual-booted the October beta of Windows 95.

From 1996 to 2003 the site was hosted in my apartments in Hayward and then Milpitas, California, on various levels of dedicated hardware (from a SPARCstation IPC and SPARCstation 2 to various Pentium Pro workstations to a 19-server multivendor multi-OS “colo” in my spare bedroom in Milpitas).

In 2003, I had been laid off and the job market was challenging, and I moved from home-hosting to a virtual machine at Johncompanies.com (technically a FreeBSD jail, but virtually the same thing). The site is still hosted there just over 10 years later.

Between 1995 and the mid-2000s I hosted/ran many mailing lists, play-by-email games, the original website/mailing list for Linux IP Masquerading, and a few other random things that came up.

Nowadays it’s mostly email filtering and a screen session for irc, but the name is still there and I have a lot of history out there on the interwebs with Indyramp.

So happy 18th birthday to Indyramp. I’m pretty sure the Fitbit on my arm has more memory than the first server that hosted you, but ultimately the Fitbit didn’t get me into hosting and networking, out to California, and to where I am today.