ParkHopping.com is over 22 years old. I registered this domain on January 1, 2004. New years day? Really? That seems weird, but that is what the WHOIS record says…
I always think of my original DisneyFans.com site as much older than ParkHopping.com, but it was only registered four years earlier in 2000.
The GeoPages Years (1995-1996)
www.geopages.com/SiliconValley/1842
However, my original site started in 1995 as a part of my “personal home page” at GeoPages.com. GeoPages, which was later renamed to GeoCities.com, offered a whopping 512K (if memory serves) of web page storage free! This, and a few similar free web hosting sites, were how quite a few of the “now ancient” theme park sites started (though few of us are still around, it seems).
I called my website “Al’s Place“. It contained sections for my local Iowa amusement park (“Al’s Adventureland InfoPages”), a section for the U.S. Disney parks, as well other sections for various hobbies and interests (such as laser tag).
Time Machine: The Internet Archive has a copy of that site, but the earliest copy they have is from January 1999:
https://web.archive.org/web/19990202065140/http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/1842
In 1996 I bought my first digital camera – an Epson PhotoPC. This let me take up to 16 “high resolution” 640 x 480 photos, or 32 at 320 x 240. At 55K (or so) per image, there was no way I could host very many photos on my free GeoCities site. Instead, at night I ran an FTP server on my laptop. Folks could dial in to the internet and “surf” to my laptop via a link on my personal home page and then download the photos I took from my trips… slowly…
Ah, current edge technology.
The Delphi Years (1997-1998)
people.delphi.com/os9al
At some point, GeoCities went away and I moved my site Delphi.com. Delphi started out in the 1980s — long before there even was a World Wide Web. It was a dial-up text service, similar to CompuServe or General Electric’s GEnie.
Side Note: GEnie was the first national text service I was on back in the late 1980s. It was through the GEnie Destination Florida RoundTable (messages, files and chat) section, which had a Walt Disney World and Disneyland section, that I learned about the coming Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland. While I went on many many summer vacations to Disney World with my family (starting in the early 1970s), I had not been to Disneyland since Big Thunder Mountain was brand new. (Or maybe it was Space Mountain, and I saw Big Thunder in Florida for the first time.)
Time Machine: The Internet Archive has a copy of my Delphi site, and goes back to 1997 (with a 1996 copyright). This tells me I probably only spent two years at GeoPages/GeoCities:
https://web.archive.org/web/19970303031312/http://people.delphi.com:80/os9al/
The Simplenet Years (1998-1999)
disneyparks.simplenet.com
After buying an expensive memory upgrade for my camera that let me take up to 99 640 x 480 images, my photo gallery really began to grow. I realized I would have to pay for a hosting service to properly share my photos. That service ended up being an “unlimited” hosting provider known as Simplenet. I created a new site called “Al’s Media Archive Site.” Thanks to “unlimited” storage, I was able to share my entire gallery of thousands of theme park photos for the first time. I kept my Delphi site around for my non-theme park content.
Welcome to the temporary index page for the all new Al’s Place photo archive site. Here you will find over SEVEN THOUSAND digital photographs taken at theme parks and other amusement places such as Disneyland, Walt Disney World (Epcot Center, The Magic Kingdom, Disney/MGM Studios, Animal Kingdom), Universal Studios Florida, Six Flags Over Georgia, Paramount’s Great America, Kennywood (Pittsburgh, PA), Winchester Mystery House (San Jose, CA), Adventureland (Des Moines, IA), Various Renaissance Festivals (Iowa & Kansas), Color Computer Fests, …and more!
At some point, Yahoo! (if I recall correctly) purchased Simplenet and removed the unlimited hosting plans. This would make it cost prohibitive for me to share my galleries there. I needed a new hosting provider, and I would finally register my own domain name.
The StG Net Years (2000-200X)
April 23, 2000 – My photo archives are now hosted at www.DisneyFans.com and my renaissance festival pictures can be found at www.AtTheFaire.com. Please visit these sites and add them to your bookmark list.
A Letter from the Webmaster…
In the past few years I have been happy to share my photo album with many of you. Simplenet has served me very, very well and I cannot thank them enough for being a great high-performance, low cost web space provider. I have absolutely zero complaints about them and would recommend them in an instant.
I now find it time to move on to the next phase of things, and thus my photos have migrated to the new DisneyFans.com domain (with my renaissance festival pictures being hosted by AtTheFaire.com). I hope you will take a moment to visit these two sites and let us know what you think. Both are still under construction, but all the photos are uploaded and in-tact (or at least they seem to be — I haven’t verified all 11,000 of them myself).
Thanks so much for visiting! If you have any questions or comments about this, feel free to e-mail me. See you real soon! — Allen
This is where a friend I knew from my Radio Shack Color Computer days, Scott G., helped out. He had a dedicated server machine hooked to the Internet and was providing “unlimited” hosting plans for $7/month. I moved my website over to his server and registered the domain name DisneyFans.com. This is where I first became a web host provider, reselling accounts on his server. At its peak, I hosted dozens of Disney fan sites for others. I chose the name DisneyFans with the idea that people could be things like “hauntedmansion.disneyfans.com” and such. Buying a domain name was quite expensive in the early days ($75/year, which adjusted for inflation today would be … more), so offering subdomains made it much more affordable for folks.
Unrelated to this site, a few months after registering DisneyFans.com I also registered a similar site dedicated for digital photos and news from Midwest Renaissance festivals. Using the domain name for that site, I must have hosted close to 200 sites for merchants, performers and even a dozen or so festival webpages. (Though my Renaissance festival partner in crime, Lindsy, did most of the web design, and I just handled the technical stuff.)
Today, I no longer offer this service publicly, but still host over 70 websites. (As of this writing, I am scaling that operation way back, with a goal of having less than 50 active accounts. Hosting fees have been going up the past few years.)
But I digress…
And the Rest (200X-2009, 2009-current)
As some point, I moved to a commercial webhosting provider and spent some good years with them before they became bad years and I had to move everything to yet another commercial hosting provider.
Which brings us up to “modern” times…
Even though ParkHopping.com came into existence just a few years after DisneyFans.com, it was basically just a placeholder until I put up a WordPress blog in 2017 for one special purpose…
And a year later, I decided to start posting retro photo essays. I began going through my oldest digital photos and creating small blog posts discussing what things were like in the parks back in the 90s.
And this leads me to the topic of this post: why does this site exist?
Why does this site exist?
In the early years of the World Wide Web, most folks didn’t have computers. And of those that did have computers, most of them did not have a telephone modem to let them dial in to the Internet. And those that did have modems mostly used services like America Online (AOL), which were graphical national networks that basically killed off all the text services like Delphi and CompuServe. (Anyone remember PC-Link? MSN? AppleLink? Prodigy?)
All of the fan websites back then started out as personal home pages or subdomains. Those that survived eventually registered domain names when they got affordable. I got my first domain name by using a service called GANDI out of France to register my domains for about $12.
Once domains got cheap, we saw a bunch of sites all using “Disney” in their domain name. (Keep in mind, my website predates The Disney Company from having their own website! While Disney had the domain name for Internet use back in 1990, they didn’t put up an official Disney website until 1996!)
Once Disney joined the World Wide Web, they initially left the fan sites alone. But, in the early 2000s, Disneyland (and maybe Disney World too?) reportedly was not inviting any web site with “Disney” in the name to any special press events. This caused many fan sites to rebrand and reregister. This may be why we ended up with sites using Disney-adjacent names such as Laughing Place, Mouse Planet and MiceAge.
For me, ParkHopping.com was my “I better stop using Disney in my domain name” domain name. I had fully planned to migrate my entire site over to that new domain and be free and clear from any problems from The Mouse.
But … I never got around to it, and Disney never asked me to stop using DisneyFans.com
And now you know why this site exists.
It is amazing to think it all started 31 years ago (yipes!) with a free personal home page.
To be continued…?