Journal Entry #1 10/13/09

The idea came to me about a month ago. A website simply about gaming. A place for gamers from all over to unite, and talk about what they love. Their would also be tutorials and other things that would create a great website, with lots members and visitors. I told all my friends about the idea, and we were set to create something new, something better, and most of all something fun

The idea was crashed when it was discovered how much it would cost to host something such as that.

So, while the idea of creating this site faded from my mind, something was still very puzzling to me. Why do websites cost so much? How do they even work? So, like any good puzzled person does, I researched this more, and discovered a word that sounded familiar to me, Unix. As I researched that, I discovered that Unix was deeply involved in the history of Linux. I researched even more, and discovered that there was one thing that most web servers had in common.

They all were running with Apache.

Apache is a huge HTTP Server, and in 2009 became the first of its kind to surpass the 100 million website milestone(It also happens to serve over 50% of all websites, and over 60% of the million biggest websites, but hey, who's counting?). But the most important fact about is: Its Classified as Open Source Software.

Well, that lead me to bigger questions. If its open source, why does this cost money? I proceeded to figure it out using common sense.

A: It still costs money for the servers, which are never cheap.

B. No one would do it, if they weren't getting money.

OK, so that solves my questions, but not my problems. But immediately, I challenged myself, I was going to be the next great website hoster. I was going to overtake sites like GoDaddy. I was going to super powerful, popular, but most importantly: Open Source.

Well, reality set in and I knew that was a long way off.

But still, I'd like to learn more about this. How do websites do what they do. I want to learn about Apache, MySQL, FTP protocals, everything!

Thats what I want to do, I want to create a super popular web hosting service. I want it to run well, be popular, and be open source, one website at a time.

But first, I must learn about what I'm doing. This is what I'm hoping to learn in this class. I want to become smarter and I want to find a career out of this.