Sinister Attraction first opened at Tripod (back in the days where they gave you 50 MB and it was free with only ONE pop-up add) on September 9, 2001. I used a program called Trellix to design the site, which was a program that enabled the user to know nothing about HTML but create a pretty decent site, so I didn't learn very much at first. For the first few months, I spent most of my time working on the content of the site, not the graphics, anyway. It's really weird that, although I do remember creating this site, I do not remember that I did open it only two days before 9/11. Later on, when the site got too big because Tripod set the space maximum back to 20 MB, a friend (wow...I definitely can't remember her name, e-mail, anything!) offered to host me on Tripod Plus, where you pay for it, more space, and there are no pop-up adds. However, with the rate that the archive was growing, I began getting near the 75 MBs of space I was given, and had to start looking for a new place since I couldn't afford my own domain back then.
At the time, around early 2002, I decided to attempt to purchase my own domain name and site package, with a fairly unknown, but cheap, company. VERY Bad mistake. Now I know to not necessarily go with the cheapest domain provider and host that is available. The site was offline for well over a month or two, and that was of course after I had moved everything and got the entire site set up for this domain, which I believe was something along the lines of "midnight-dreams.net" or something. That failed right from the beginning, so I did go back to Tripod regardless of how little space I had left to my account.
It was then that the whole Darkprophecies.net fiasco came up. Jaina, the owner of Dusk Til Dawn, e-mailed me and offered to host SA on their domain, www.darkprophecies.net. I clearly remember being one of the very first hostees to move in...I think I was either second or third. It was great -- for the first few months, anyway. I had 200 MB of space and plenty of bandwidth, and the other hostees were also great (there were some awesome, awesome sites there - general, award sites, 'shipper sites of all kinds, personal artwork/fiction sites, etc), and some of us became really good friends. However, all of a sudden, the domain died. It just DIED. It was back up in another week or two before the domain got shut down for good again. The reason it got shut down was that certain sites had copy written files (like mp3s, wavs, mpegs, etc.) on their site and that was against the rules of the domain provider. Even though the provider put DP.net back up, it was shut down once again for the same reason. Most of the hostees were annoyed since there were now some 30 or 40 homeless sites after that and the owners provided no help and gave no updates or let us know what was going on at the time. And as far as I can tell, many of them never got back up on their feet after that.
So there SA was, a homeless site, that was over 100 MB, and needed plenty of bandwidth to survive -- which meant no free servers would ever be able to support my site. I lost a lot of visitors because of what happened with Darkprophecies, but luckily, I recovered. Luckily, Cecile from www.stuck-in-the-middle.com stepped in and graciously offered to host me for a couple months until I could get up enough money to buy my own domain. She's such a sweetie and helped me out SO much, and we became good friends. If it weren't for her, my site probably would have died right there. Anyway, she hosted me on her site for a little over two months while I worked on saving my money.
I bought my own domain with Active Web Hosting in January -- www.cloudy-visions.org and uploaded SA there. It was there for about 7 months before I realized that the site was too huge to be on a domain where I also had 5 other sites and a few hosted sites. In late June, almost July, I bought another, separate domain for Sinister Attraction -- www.sinister-attraction.org which is where the site will remain until I close. Then, in late August 2003, I realized that Active Web Hosting LIES when it says that it has unlimited bandwidth and is a great place to have a site that has high bandwidth and many visitors. So, I decided to move to a new domain provider, one that Annalore pointed out to me one night. (Thank you!) I ended my account with AWH and set up SA at www.netrillium.net, where I actually had a space/bandwidth plan and a control panel (which I love!).
In 2005, I opened a new branch to the SA domain - Poetic Attraction, the first and only site dedicated to a relationship between Buffy and William, which really is my secret-sappy-OMG so sweet-relationship that I love to read, and wish there was more of to do so! Although the site will never reach the size and popularity as SA, I think it makes a great addition to the domain and serves as the ultimate alter-ego to Spuffy.
SA.org has been with Netrillium since August of 2003 and although there have been a few mishaps with servers/downtime, etc., overall, I have been very happy with the move. My life has become increasingly hectic with college, work, and attempting to have a social life. I even took a break from the entire fandom from October '05-December '05, which was really necessary after working nonstop with the site for four years. But I can always think back to the site with a satisfied feeling in my heart, knowing that I have done my best to create and maintain the best Spuffy site possible.
So there is the boring history of SA!
(Originally written on or around 1/27/04. Comments added in bold are new as of 1/26/06)
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