What is SteinSOFT ?!

So you might ask what sort of company SteinSOFT is. In fact it isn't a real company in the common sense but it is a small, one-person company that exists in the internet only. The one and only "employee" at the moment is André Stein alias Stonemaster, that's me. SteinSOFT is a site intented for programmers, with code snippets and many helpful code examples. Another goal of the site is to showcase my projects. And as every little company, SteinSOFT has its own history too.

The history of SteinSOFT

Everything began in the last days of rainy december 2000. Christmas was near or already past - I can't remember exactly - when I had the idea to create my own homepage. I always thought about this but I never really knew what to put on my site. I didn't want one of these personal sites which can be found very often on the net... boring. As I am a hobby programmer, I knew that I was going to create a site about C++ & OpenGL and programming in general.

OK.. I had some ideas. So I began to design a little layout. At that time I wasn't really good in HTML and website-building. But fortunately all this isn't that difficult. Finally I had finished my layout and I began to fill in content. I collected my code and my programs, zipped them ... and voilà my site was nearly online! I still have a page of the first version online.

Of course you need a web space provider to put your site online. But I didn't want to spend money so I registered at port5.com. I knew this address because of a friend's friend who had a homepage. The first thing I noticed was that there weren't any ads on the pages. Secondly they gave you 15 Megs of space and CGI-BIN... Although I didn't know CGI-BIN, I thought that could only be good. So my first site was born - Stonemaster's Site - with the cool URL http://stonemaster.port5.com.

So my site was running and I told Nehe that I have a site about OpenGL and I had even more than 100 visitors a day - Okay compared to bigger sites that's nothing but I was real happy about those few visitors :-). I was constantly updating my site and I also added a guestbook and a chat. Everything went good and I didn't have any problems. Only one thing disturbed me a little bit: the speed. But I knew it was a free provider so I couldn't complain.

But some time when I wanted to update my site I couldn't log in on my FTP-Server. This sometimes happened before so I didn't bother. After two days I still couldn't upload my files so I became suspicious. On the mainsite of my web space provider, portland.co.uk (port5 is a subsidiary company of portland), I read the bad news: The traffic of your site mustn't exceed 100 MB per month! What?! Nowhere on the Port5-site something like this was written. I couldn't access my FTP-account anymore and I couldn't update my site. What a crap.

I tried almost every day to upload files, but I never managed to. I also wrote some mails to the Port5 support but never got any answer. So I was looking for a new provider and I also found one very quickly: Datablocks.net also provided free web space with CGI-BIN and no ads. I uploaded my files but I never really used the service because their servers were often down and the support was bad. In the same time I decided to register my own domain. If I changed sometime the web space, at least the URL would stay the same.

I first wanted to buy a stonemaster.*** domain but they were all already registered. So I decided to register SteinSOFT.net. I took the name SteinSOFT because of my surname and I had always been using that name for my projects.

It was absolutely no problem to do this. The only thing I needed was web space. At hostsearch.com I quickly found a good one, Neozite.com. I signed up for a 50MB web space package with Perl, ASP, own mailserveraddress(mail.steinsoft.net), own FTP-Serveraddress(ftp.steinsoft.net) and other goodies.

Okay SteinSOFT.net was born but one of most obvious characteristics of the site was it contant downtime. Some weeks after I had signed up for that webspace it had to close. That was the beginning of a very frustrating search for a good webspace provider but it then proved that I am soo bad at finding a good one that indeed could survive more than three weeks.

Anyway if you see this, you know the site is online ;-). And if it isn't accessible sometime in the future, never forget that SteinSOFT will never ever go down and that it will re-appear soon. Viva SteinSOFT!