Home of The Underdogs - History

History

• While at first hosted on free web hosts, Home of the Underdogs began using a dedicated server due to its high bandwidth usage in February 2000. The original domain name was theunderdogs.org. Achavanuntakul long resisted the commercialization of the site with ads and popups but eventually agreed to it after donations were unable to cover mounting bandwidth costs.
• In 2002 the domain name was changed to the-underdogs.org and in 2006 to www.the-underdogs.info. The reason in both cases was that the domain was not renewed in time and was subsequently taken over by cybersquatters.
• After January 13, 2006, addition of any new entries to the site ceased completely.
• After a brief stint of being offline during the month of September 2008, HotU seemingly returned late in the month; however, the games once offered were no longer available.
• On February 13, 2009 the original Home of the Underdogs went offline. According to a message posted on Twitter by the site's owner, this was because of the webhost's bankruptcy.
• On March 8, 2009, the first of the "new" Home Of The Underdogs sites went online at www.hotud.org, based on the Joomla! CMS.
• On March 24, 2009, a second site went online at www.HomeOfTheUnderdogs.net. It retains the design of the original site and does not use a CMS. The two sites work independently of each other; neither is endorsed by Achavanuntakul.
• As of 8 April 2009, several sites were still working independently of each other. Some share common goals, but none is allegedly endorsed by Sarinee, the webhost of the original site (a partial list of the sites involved can be viewed here).
• As of 4 June 2009, Hotud.org had both downloads of most listed games, manuals, user reviews, new user listings, user uploads, forums and many other community features. The original archive was now in the process of being improved and grown beyond the source data.
• As of 15 September 2009, Hotud.org had rebuilt the archive. An active team of four people is working on correcting errors in the filesystem. There is an active relationship between Hotud.org and GOG.com to promote both the history of classic gaming as well as modern access to these classic games.