Summitt New Media, LLC

After we finished our first book with IDG Books Worldwide, Creating Cool^TM 3D Web Worlds with VRML, we immediately signed to do the second book, Creating Cool^TM Interactive Web Sites. The book was aimed at someone interested in setting up their first web server directly on the Internet and we wanted to be able to speak from experience. This, of course, required that we set up our own server.

We contacted Victor Hirst, then of Pittsburg Online, and arranged for the special line. The original site was created using a 486 DX2 66 running Windows® 95 with 16 Meg of RAM and 1.5 Gig of hard drive space. We began with
uarterdeck's WebServer 16-bit software. We then upgraded to Quarterdeck's 32-bit WebStar server software. We ran the site for over six months using this software on a standard phone line using a 28.8 Kb internal SupraFaxModem. This was all described and discussed in the book. Some reviews have stated that this software and hardware configuration was grossly inadequate for providing a web site on the Internet yet it operated with little problems for over six months in this manner and performed the tasks we set it. It accomplished the tasks we set for it. We admit that our tasks were not those of a mega-company.

As the publication date for Creating Cool^TM Interactive Web Sites grew closer, we signed another book contract with IDG. This time for a book to be called Creating Cool^TM FrontPage^TM Web Sites. This book came out in late September 1996. For a period of time, this site ran using FrontPage^TM Personal Web Server as its server software. We later moved the web site from our 486DX2 to one of Victor's machines running Apache with FrontPage™ extensions in order to provide better service than the 28.8 modem and 486 could provide. This resulted in a few problems that took a while to correct.

An important consideration of the book Creating Cool^TM Interactive Web Sites was that it was possible to run your site using hardware and software you already had or were easily obtainable. The VREvolution web site proved that position many times over since its creation. It was also important to note that the book never aimed at setting up a business site using the original software, only a personal and experimental site.

With the renaming of the company and the web site, we again moved our site to a server where we felt could count on dependability. Our web site was located on an Earthlink server with FrontPage™ extensions for almost two years. We have worked with Earthlink, Inc, since the early books with IDG and anticipate further growth in their services and company. Earthlink, however, hosts their sites on UNIX systems with FrontPage extensions. We needed to experiment more with other platforms.

We soon moved our site to our own machine, a Windows 2000 server running IIS 5.0 with FrontPage 2000 extensions, as we continued to explore the other hosting alternatives.  The site was hosted with Summitt.Net before being moved to Integra Communications. We're now back with Summitt.Net.