Are the servers still in Particle's basement?

[Adam6]

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]

They're probably in his basement now rather than his parents' basement

[Particle]

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.

[Adam6]

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.

[KoRo]

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.

[Crash]

Hello all! Just stopping by again and glad to see the website is still up, and that part is even still making tweaks as of last year! Thanks for all you do Particle. My time spent with you all is looked back on fondly. Thanks for putting up with my nonsense and giving us a place to have fun