Happy Birthday TMS

Oh how far we have come in these 3 long years. You probably do not know this but August 8th 2009 is the 3rd birthday for TheModShop. Now TMS has not always been a blog but it has always been run by myself [and sometimes Dark when he gets his ass on here to post something].

Click to read about the history of myself and TheModShop and how it came to be what you see it as today.

TMS did exist prior to that date however that was a dark and sad time that I don’t like to talk about however I will right now. TMS was my first website that I ever really created myself. When it first started I was 15 years old [not kidding] and it was created on a free subdomain with free hosting and was made up of static .html pages that had very little content. Mostly about FlatOut [a old racing game]. It was my pride and joy at the time and I spent hours upon hours on that original website creating / coding / modifying it till I was happy. Shortly after that the host that I was using SHUT DOWN.

A week later I convinced my mother to buy me a domain name and pay for the hosting. I went to godaddy and bought the domain name and the smallest hosting package they offered. I created a site based on the Joomla CMS and added a forum and tried to build a community. Well there were a few regular posters but nothing to major and it was kind of a slow site. A month after I created TMS I bought the domain name freetshost.com and created a website for that.

Freetshost.com was a free teamspeak host and for years we were the best there was. Due to high license fees and abuse I was forced [a few times] to shut it down. However it did teach me a lot and is probably what got me into the hosting industry in the first place.

After freetshost opened I got my first dedicated server from a company called GalacNet based out of Singapore. It was a Cobalt RAQ3 and was used to host the teamspeak servers. All the webhosting stayed with godaddy. Slowly the sites were growing in size and godaddy finally kicked us off the shared hosting and I was forced to upgrade my server with GN. The 2nd server I got from them was a p4 with 512mb of ram and the first server I had ever gotten with the DirectAdmin control panel. [This began my love for DA]

As time went on I moved through a few datacenters and themodshop changed drastically. It was changed from Joomla to PHP Nuke. We had a small clan going for a little while and long story short that failed. All this took place in less than a year.

In November of 2007 TMS was changed from PHP Nuke over to WordPress and thus my love of blogging became an addiction. Things have still been changed a lot since that time. We had a community forum that at one point was based off of Simple Machine forums and was decently active. Then there was the addition of the custom downloads section. [to this day that has not changed code wise.] The site itself went from a pre-made WordPress them to a customized one more fitting to the style and how I like my sites [Dark].

In March of 2008 I made the best move I have ever made hosting wise. I switched providers to ServerComplete. Since then I have become friends with the owner [Daniel] and have bought many servers from him. As of right now this website is even being hosted on a server provided by ServerComplete.

In the Summer of 2008 FreeTSHost shut down for the final time. We were rocking with sales and everything however my partner at the time decided it was a good idea to stab me in the back and thus I was forced to shut it down. From then on I have always said no to anyone wanting to partner up with me. I sold the domain shortly after that.

In September of 2008 MagniRack was born! Magnirack is one of my other websites. There I sell gameservers teamspeak servers and more. Since I started it the popularity of it has grown so much. It is now what pays the bills for this site and keeps everything online and happy.

In November of 2008 I acquired DeiseHost from another person. I have been running it ever since. [It also helps pay the bills ;)]

Since then TheModShop has not changed very much in terms of design or anything else. For almost a year now I [and rarely Dark] have made 1 post per day and tried to keep the site interesting. The forums were changed over to MyBB and then shortly after taken offline due to spam bots and the lack of community support directed towards it. The downloads section has been updated a bit in the design area however for the most part it remains unchanged. I have also started up some other sites.

This summer I started a local news site and it is a hit with the locals in the area. Currently that site has 800 followers on twitter and the blog posting robot has posted nearly 1500 blog posts! Just where did I learn all the stuff I put into place on that site? Right here! Thats right all the stuff that I put into that site is stuff I picked up while doing work on TheModShop.

Since starting themodshop my knowledge of computers the internet, networking, the hosting industry and business [yes business] has grown so much and so fast just like the site itself. Even if TheModShop is not as popular as Gizmodo or Hack A Day [2 sites we have been featured on]. It is still plenty big enough that some people know about it. Last month we got nearly 10,000 unique viewers to the site. Those 10,000 viewed 75,000 pages and used up only 20gb of bandwidth!

I hope to keep TMS running till the internet crashes and I hope that it keeps growling along with my knowledge.

Some people that have helped through out the times that I would like to thank.

• Daniel S.
• Justin D.
• All the guys on the FreeWebSpace.net forums.
• Google [for with out google reader I would go crazy]
• My Mother [for buying me the origonal domain name :P]

I would also like to thank all the people who look at the site and enjoy the content that is posted here.

If you have any suggestions tips or mods that you would like to share with us just send them to us on the Contact Us page.

-Tracker

I have no doubt that this site will keep running for a long time and hopefully some better content will be posted than some that is on here currently.