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History of Ford-Diesel.Com:
TheDieselStop.Com began (as so many others things do) from a spark of an idea back
in 1997 when I bought my Power Stroke. I'd been using the Internet for several years
and was used to finding almost any information I wanted on it. A day or two after I
bought my truck, I did several searches for Ford Diesel, Power Stroke, etc. and came
up with absolutely nothing. I couldn't believe it, a subject without a website? Since
I was a half owner of Abingdon Online, I decided to
play around with creating a Power Stroke website. The initial version, with very little
information available, went online on 7/30/97. I submitted it to several search engines
and posted information on other Ford-related websites and soon began getting several
hits per day. I soon added more information and online conferences as traffic picked up.
I got about 1000 hits that first month.
Traffic kept picking up as word-of-mouth spread and the search engines cataloged the
website. The first six months or so were very busy with lots of content changes, pictures,
and hundreds of messages in the conference section. I opened new conferences for the 1999
Super Duty's, for the older 6.9/7.3 liter diesels, and changed the name of the website
to The Ford Diesel Website.
This kept up for about a year with literally thousands and thousands of messages to
read and search through and about 1000 hits/day. Traffic levels got so high that our
main www.abol.com server began to slow down and crash from the load. At night between about
6:00 and 12:00 the server was averaging about 6-8 hits per second. The server was a lowly
486/75 running Windows95 and Searchlight's Spinnaker webserver. I knew that I needed a new
server, but didn't know how to justify spending that much money for what was still a free
website. After discussing it on the conferences, it was decided that I would start
accepting donations to purchase a new server. I needed about $1000 to buy everything
to build the new system. I didn't think there was any way I'd ever get that much. I had
no idea what kind of response I'd actually get. I ended up with about $4600!
I decided to spend the extra money to buy better parts for the server, different forum
software, registration of ford-diesel.com, and a high-speed line to my house. This allowed
me to build a very fast server and keep it at my house so it was easier to update and
maintain. The new webserver made it's debut on 4/1/99.
Update 1-1-2000:
Since April 1999, the site has grown tremendously. The new Super Duty's introduced
last year have become extremely popular (along with the Power Stroke engine) and the
number of visitors per day just keeps going up along with traffic levels. The speed
of the Internet link has been increased to help compensate for traffic levels. Several
new Editors have been added to help maintain the site. We
are currently testing a new chat server and will be adding even more features soon.
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