Today RogerLe.com turns thirty. It started on October 31, 1996, in Dallas, Texas, and it is still running.
I came to the US from Portugal, where I had been a journalist. Being a journalist was not an option here, so I went to the technical side. Web hosting was just starting at the time, and almost nobody was offering it in Portuguese. So I started a company offering web hosting in Portuguese, probably one of the first in the world, and most likely the longest running one now.
The name is simple. RogerLe is Roger and Le, nothing else. I always spelled it as the RogerLe Company.
I did not start with my own machines. I bought service from iserver.com, which had a new thing called virtual servers. I bought a virtual machine and started offering web hosting on it. It was a kind of VPS, before VPS was a word people used.
The idea of shutting it down was never in my mind, not even today. We make almost no money from it now, but it represents a lot for us, so it stays on and running.
In January 2000, the Brazilian magazine Info named us the best web hosting company for the Portuguese speaking community. That gave us a lot of customers, and also a lot of work. At the time I was working full time in the US, so RogerLe.com was a side project, and I could not handle the number of customers. We gained probably 300 customers in the month after the article was published, and lost 200 in the next few months because I could not support them all. After six months we stabilized, and things went well for several years.
Broadband helped a lot. More people started using the Internet and the web, so companies started to want hosting and websites. What hurt was the consolidation of the industry. Hosting companies started buying each other and became bigger and better known. And the price advantage I had in the beginning, US hosting prices for Portugal and Brazil, was no longer there. The real finished the job. The Brazilian real used to be 1 to 1 with the US dollar. Now it is 5 or 6 to 1. We lost a lot of customers to that too.
I think the clients stayed because of the personal touch. One client has been with us since 1999. He has four sites with us. Sometime in the 2000s he moved his main site to a big hosting company. Six months later he came back. His site needed a lot of customized PHP settings, and the big company would not do it. So I set up the site for him here, with all the settings he needed.
Le is my anchor and my partner in life. Her role at RogerLe.com was never on the technical side. But the company held her up once. Around 2007 and 2008, in the financial crisis, she lost her job and took a long time to find another one. We filled the gap in her resume with RogerLe.com, as a customer service representative. She got a job at Southwest Airlines. They called me to verify it, and they asked for a customer reference who could confirm she had worked for us. The reference was given by that same client, the one who left and came back. Her best job in her life, at Southwest Airlines, was in part because RogerLe.com existed.
It works the other way too. All my jobs in the US were because of RogerLe.com and what I learned setting up the technical side of the business. I learned Perl for RogerLe.com, and my first technical job in the US was as a Perl programmer. Later came PHP and MySQL, and everything else followed from there.
This post is a homage. RogerLe.com is our lives. What we got out of it is more than money. In 1996 I never thought I would be writing a blog post for RogerLe.com thirty years later, with the company still running. You read the stats, and they say most businesses fold in the first year or two. I did not expect to last this long.
Grateful for all that RogerLe.com represents.