popularity of the site increased and more files were slowly added. mp3s were an emerging technology and i decided that they would be a great addition to the site - now people who had never bought the music could give it a try and decide if they liked it. it worked. mp3s consumed the site. more people were visiting. more people added other content. blaine dulin and i created the second nine inch nails theme to fill demand. a no-name url would no longer cut it. i looked into buying a domain and found that it would be affordable. nineinchnails.net was available and rolled off the tongue quite well. it was done. i bought space on an isp so that i could have the domain. at the same time i kept the files on my server at virginia tech.

the site continued to grow - more than i ever could have imagined. keeping track of the amount of visitors was becoming difficult - log files approached 30mb each day! the 486 was unable to keep up with the demand of hundreds of users trying to get files so i built another machine. a pentium 133 with 64mb of ram, i even overclocked it to 150mhz to get the most speed out of it. i put only a network card and video card in it and it's only task was to serve up files. that it did. - and it did it very well. in fact, i would invite people to my dorm room and show them the computer working. it was amazing to watch and hear - the hard disk light never shut off and you could constantly hear the hard disk thrashing to serve files.

virginia tech (vt) began to notice the impact of the site on their network. they warned me many times that i was using "inordinate" amounts of bandwidth. they told me to shut it off, or they would. i would let off for a while and then would start right back up again - the fans demanded it (thats you). i was interested to find out just how much bandwidth i was using so i looked up some information and did some research. vt has a single t3 connection to the net - better than most universities and internet service providers. after doing some benchmarks, i found that at times i was using about 1/10 of the entire campus bandwidth. not bad considering there are 9,000 other people living on campus.

the problem was so bad for vt that i got to talk to the assistant dean about my abuse of the network. mp3s went off and on the site during this time as you may remember. eventually i had to limit the number connections which made a few people mad, but it was beyond my control.

what next? i started up a business with some partners called extreme web. we co-located a dell poweredge 2200 server with lots of horsepower and multiple t3s on-site. mp3s were free to the world again. ahhh, but the story doesn't end there as you all know. the riaa still had a score to settle. they threatened legal action - as they have with numerous other sites. the removal of the mp3s did have one good point to it though.