Site history
From Schaffter
This site officially opened on 1-Jan-1999.
Before that, in the mid nineteen-nineties, the site was spread around on different 'free' locations. That included different sites on CompuServe, GeoCities, Xoom (are those still around?) and a few more spots in the Web.
Those who were around at that time may remember those names with a certain amount of nostalgia.
In 1999 I just had it with banners, watermarks, limited ftp connections, disk quotas etc. That's why I decided to create my private site. So the schaffter.com Internet domain was born. Having done that, it was "just" a question of finding a good provider of public internet space and build web pages.
Between Jan-1999 and May-2004, the site was hosted by SoftCom. Since SoftCom is a Canadian company, the site was physically located on a server in Canada. Furthermore, I was limited to 50MB disk, anonymous ftp but no shell account. The price was interesting, though.
In 2004, I signed up with Bytemark, a UK based hosting company. They provide me with a full virtual machine, in which I run my own Linux based virtual computer. That includes a root account and pretty much everything you could expect from a Linux computer. Except direct access to the hardware.
In the early 2008, I started to work on the current setup, using the MediaWiki software to maintain the contents. Now I can concentrate on contents instead of the form.
