Gaming Unlimited

3 D - U n l i m i t e d N e t w o r k I n f o

About the 3D-Unlimited Network
By: Alex Behrens

The 3D-Unlimited Network started back in 1996 as Big Al's Kick Ass Quake II News site over at Tripod. At the time the site was devoted primarily to Quake & Quake II news. The site grew and grew, I still remember the day when the counter hit 25,000 visitors. We averaged about 150-250 viewers per day and we did very well. In 1997, we got an offer from Gamestats.com for hosting and to join their network. It was the first major break we had and we jumped on the offer very quickly, and the rest is history...

The guys over at gamestats.com were wonderful and helped us out with whatever we needed. We switched urls and the site continued to grow. The site moved from just one main site to four sites. We had several offers from viewers for an "upgraded" place to host their site and gamestats.com decided to host three more sites on our ever-expanding Quake gaming network. After running the site for nearly a year and traffic still continuing to grow, we decided to take on the roll of a full-scale gaming network. It took us about 4-5 months of preparation and time to get the network going, but on June 20, 1998, 3D-Unlimited was born. The site started out with about 500 viewers per day and continued to grow, with the original three hosted sites from Big Al's Kick Ass Quake II News along side us. We moved away from Gamestats.com to a new host so we had more control and flexibility with advertising and accounts.

We searched high and low for a host for about a month and finally found Communitech.net to be a worthy enough host for our fast expanding gaming network. This turned out to the be one of the biggest mistakes, Communitech.net cut off our hosting after the site grew too large and their "Unlimited bandwidth" ran out... This hurt our reputation as a full-scale network and gave us the reputation of a gaming network that couldn't stay online for over a month and we lost many viewers over the next 8 months.

We went on a hosting spree for about 8 months, jumping between 8 hosts and 2 gaming networks (Gamestream.net and Telefragged.com) and eventually settled at FGN.com. Where all our sites (about 20 at the time) were hosted on their dedicated servers. After about 6 months, we outgrew FGN.com and were forced to relocate and find our own hosting. I decided to go into a partnership with a friend of mine, at the time, and host our networks on the same Cobalt RAQ 2 server, 3d-unlimited.com and 3dgameforce.com. This worked for about 3 months and eventually fell threw when we wanted to move to a database driven site and the server warranty wouldn't warrant php & mysql installations. Once again we were forced to find another host.

I asked several friends about a good dedicated hosting service and eventually wound up moving the network to our own dedicated server at DN.net (Digital Nation, now Verio.net) and this is where we reside today. We have been on the same linux box for over a year now (Jan 5th was one year) and the folks at Verio have been wonderful and have helped us perform several very speedy upgrades and get out sites running faster as we continue to expand. We look forward to the working with them more in the future as we expand our network to use a farm of servers.

After being settled into our new server for about three months with just 3d-unlimited.com and about 15 hosted sites we were really rocking. Traffic was better than ever, but one problem was arising, hardware content. Our site was originally built on the concept of the "The all-around 3D Gaming Site" and our network hosted all gaming websites and we had only posted gaming related articles and reviews.

In about mid-1999, we brought on several hardware writers, Peter Dannenberg & Jason Adrian and our content went from 100% gaming to 40% gaming and 60% hardware. This didn't work from my perspective, at least in the current scheme and design of the site. Our viewers weren't complaining but we were losing our gaming edge on the community and we had more hardware viewers on the site and I didn't like it.

To solve the solution I moved to my network huge endeavor and that was to split up the network into six sites, with the first one being the portal site: 3d-unlimited.com, hardware-unlimited.com, gaming-unlimited.com, console-unlimited.com, coding-unlimited.com, and net-unlimited.net and have our content posted respectively on all the sites. Hence, creating individual communities, but still functioning as one connected network. To put my idea into work I hired a designer, Q-Ball from Toxic Design, to create and design a universal, "networked", design for all the sites. This is where the new 3DU network concept was born. At this point, 3D-Unlimited, Gaming-Unlimited, & Hardware-Unlimited, are all functioning and we are still working on getting Console-Unlimited and Coding-Unlimited online. Net-Unlimited is on the "back-burner" and this time and is expected to return some time later this year.

To get the new network off on a good foot we brought on Freddie Freeman to manage Gaming-Unlimited and Jason Adrian was appointed as Editor at Hardware-Unlimited. The network is doing great and we are still expanding. After getting the new network scheme and the three main sites going we moved away from FGN (because of financial troubles) and are now with UGO as our current advertiser. They have helped us out greatly and pay very well. We are going to be launching Console-Unlimited in the next few weeks and expect a great turn out on that site.

As of right now our network is doing about 75,000 hits per day and serving around 400,000 viewers per month. We are still growing and expect to be serving 1 million viewers per month by the end of 2001 and have two more main sites open.

From everyone at the 3D-Unlimited Network we would just like to express our appreciation and thanks to all the viewers, without all you guys we would not be here today. Thanks guys!

Just in case any of you are curious here is a picture of the network admin/founder, Alex Behrens: