Author Topic: Are the servers still in Particle's basement?  (Read 3645 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Adam6

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 40
  • Reputation: +0/-0
Are the servers still in Particle's basement?
« on: April 13, 2022 08:45 am CDT »
I remember being like 12 years old, watching my brother play PCRPG and he told me that some rich dude in kansas just loves to host stuff and had some extra computer equipment in his basement.

Is that still the case? Haha

KoRo

  • Fat, Emo Robot
  • Centurian Lord
  • ********
  • Posts: 3,437
  • Reputation: +14/-6
Re: Are the servers still in Particle's basement?
« Reply #1 on: April 28, 2022 12:19 am CDT »
They're probably in his basement now rather than his parents' basement :P

Particle

  • Chief Codemonger
  • Administrator
  • Centurian Lord
  • ********
  • Posts: 5,904
  • Reputation: +20/-4
    • Particle's Custom RPG
Re: Are the servers still in Particle's basement?
« Reply #2 on: May 14, 2022 07:43 pm CDT »
The server has been in a few different places over the years.  It was initially hosted in my dad's shop on a Pentium 166 upstairs when we had 1.5 Mbps ADSL.  After a time, it was too taxing on the anemic 128 Kbps upstream such that it made our connection crawl in both directions so I had to face the prospect of shutting it down.  At that time, a guy named Iron Maiden who hosted stuff on the side in Texas offered to host us and provided an old, retired Pentium 3 server and remote access.  I set up shop on his machine for a few years until I managed to get through college and land a job.  Once I had income, I rented a virtual private server and moved the server onto it while thanking IM for having been so generous.  We hopped to another, better VPS later on.  After a couple years of that, I had a server in a datacenter that I owned and we moved onto it.  We've been on that for about a decade.  The dedicated server itself has been refreshed twice (we're on the third incarnation of the server hardware) and moved once to in that time.

For the record, I was never and am still not anything close to being rich.  lol  As chance would have it though, I do have a third refresh being spun up literally in my basement right now.  It will eventually be swapped with the current server.
As a point of history:  Our last server clear was on September 27, 2004.  That is 4963 days ago (13.6 years) as of today.

If you're visiting after a long hiatus and have forgotten your password, try emailing me via the support form at http://www.pcrpg.org.

If your character is from after the 2004 clear but appears to have been deleted or reset, chances are it was caught in one of the inactive account purges over the years.  Backups were made before such events, so try the support form.

Adam6

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 40
  • Reputation: +0/-0
Re: Are the servers still in Particle's basement?
« Reply #3 on: January 28, 2023 04:01 pm CST »
The server has been in a few different places over the years.  It was initially hosted in my dad's shop on a Pentium 166 upstairs when we had 1.5 Mbps ADSL.  After a time, it was too taxing on the anemic 128 Kbps upstream such that it made our connection crawl in both directions so I had to face the prospect of shutting it down.  At that time, a guy named Iron Maiden who hosted stuff on the side in Texas offered to host us and provided an old, retired Pentium 3 server and remote access.  I set up shop on his machine for a few years until I managed to get through college and land a job.  Once I had income, I rented a virtual private server and moved the server onto it while thanking IM for having been so generous.  We hopped to another, better VPS later on.  After a couple years of that, I had a server in a datacenter that I owned and we moved onto it.  We've been on that for about a decade.  The dedicated server itself has been refreshed twice (we're on the third incarnation of the server hardware) and moved once to in that time.

For the record, I was never and am still not anything close to being rich.  lol  As chance would have it though, I do have a third refresh being spun up literally in my basement right now.  It will eventually be swapped with the current server.


I've kind of wondered why you still keep these servers running and the forums online. But after looking back through my posts that I made when I was 12-13 years old back from 2008, this stuff is gold... I've been laughing my ass off reading stuff. I think I get it now. I could imagine from your perspective, just hosting the stuff and looking at forums, you've probably had your fair share of laughs.

Thanks for keeping the lights on and allowing this to still be a part of people's history. Nowadays you probably don't even notice the bandwidth being gone, do you? *insert famous 'thanks for eating my bandwidth'* saying you see on the downloads page.
« Last Edit: January 28, 2023 04:09 pm CST by Adam6 »

KoRo

  • Fat, Emo Robot
  • Centurian Lord
  • ********
  • Posts: 3,437
  • Reputation: +14/-6
Re: Are the servers still in Particle's basement?
« Reply #4 on: May 14, 2024 02:59 pm CDT »
Every time I go back home to visit my parents, I spend some time digging through my old closet. I could have sworn I had some old hard drives from back in my high school days just sitting on a shelf somewhere. I wouldn't have thrown them away all willy-nilly. There's probably some saved MSN or AOL chats on there that would be internet archive gold. Trying to find all that old stuff makes me feel like some sort of cultural anthropologist. It's amazing how quickly things have changed in our short lifetimes.