25th Anniversary

25th Anniversary

On November 29th 2025, the domain ustoopia.nl reached its 25th birthday, and this birthday was quite a milestone, so we’re focusing on this memorable achievement on this dedicated page.

There are some things we did to commemorate our anniversary. One of which is a complete overhaul of the website. If you are a returning visitor, you may have already noticed the brand new website’s appearance. Before, we always used a rather generic, inexpensive theme, made by a third party, used by many other websites out there. This is no longer the case, because now you’re looking at a 100% unique, tailor made, custom theme, entirely made by our lovely selves, from absolute scratch! We used Oxygen Builder for WordPress to achieve this, in case you’re wondering. It took many more hours to complete than we had anticipated, but we’re very happy, and proud, with the end results. Dark mode baby! Hopefully you will also consider it to be a big improvement. What do you think?

The new layout, is not entirely finished yet. Especially for mobile devices, we still have some work to do. So, if you encounter any weird-looking things or strange behavior, don’t be surprised. In fact, please let us know, so we can correct it. We decided to go live with this new layout, in spite of its incompleteness, so it’s somewhat inline with our anniversary. Being somewhat of a perfectionist, fiddling around with the layout will probably become a never ending task. But, for now, it is what it is.

Besides the new layout, this page you are currently at, was also put together to further commemorate the anniversary. Below you’ll find a story about the entire history behind this website. This includes a very cool timeline, further down this page. It shows the most important events, and unimportant ones as well, starting in the year 2000, all the way down to the current day. If you’re interested, be sure to scroll down to check it out. But first here below, you’ll find the archives, where you can take a look at several old versions of this website, that we recovered from really old backup files.

The Archives

Here are some links to archived, old versions of websites that at one point ran on ustoopia.nl. Mind you that some functionalities are no longer working, especially java and flash content. Also, many outgoing links, especially on the weblog site, are dead nowadays.

Game Servers

While we are on the subject of archiving digital inheritance, it should also be know that efforts have been made not only to preserve old websites, but also to allow older, online games, to be played up to this very day. On a dedicated VPS we host game-servers for game such as: Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike Source, Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena. The last two operate in regular mode, but the Counter Strike game servers run a very specific, exotic mod, that distinguishes them from any regular server. A little mod called HookGrab, allows players to defy gravity, resulting in a unique form of game-play that is rarely found. This type of game-server has been our thing since 2005, give or take a handful of interruptions. Back then, these servers became immensely popular, and managing the social aspect of the player-base, almost became a full-time job. But nowadays, not so much anymore. In spite of that, we believe that keeping these servers running, whether or not nostalgia has anything to do with it, actively contributes to digital content preservation on the world wide web. Nobody wants a dead internet ↗, right? (Interesting video on the subject of a dead internet ↗)

History

The story of the history of this website and the domain begins twenty-five years ago. On Wednesday the 29th of November, at 07:14 UTC to be really specific. I was working for an internet service provider, that was really popular in my area at the time, named IAE, which stood for Internet Access Eindhoven. This provider company grew so hard, that we became used to meeting new colleagues almost weekly. At some point, the company changed its name to ViaNetworks, and we moved to a brand new, fancy office building in Son. Looking back at this period, this job was one of the most fun jobs I ever had. Not because of what I had to do there, or how the company treated employees, but mainly because of the colleagues I worked with. Ralph, a friend at the time, applied for a job there, and was hired. Ralph had a car, and carpooling with him saved me a lot of travel time. Now, all these years later, I still associate the Red Hot Chili Peppers with Ralph, and that period in my life, since we listened to it on high volume nearly each morning in the car. Later on, Ronnie, another friend, and a flat-mate actually, also came to work there. Good times, for sure.

Back then, it was not yet possible for individuals to get a .nl domain name, since a registration number from the department of commerce was still required to register a domain name. At some point late November, my boss told me that every employee was allowed to pick a .nl domain name, that would be registered by the company, but we would eventually own the domain name ourselves. It was already very late in the afternoon when this was brought to my attention, and I barely had any time to come up with a domain name. In those days, it wasn’t that difficult to come up with a name that didn’t exist yet. Nowadays, it’s really annoying to find a domain name that is not already in use, but back then this wasn’t the case yet. After hearing some of the domain names that colleagues had chosen, it became clear that picking a cool name that really fit the person became somewhat of a competition. That’s when I thought of a nickname, that I coincidentally came up with earlier that week, that I was using in the game Counter-Strike, that I was playing several hours each day.

When I was trying to think up a new nickname for myself earlier that week, I combined my last name Stoop with the word Utopia, which makes Ustoopia. I remember that I believed this was a fun, creative nickname, and most of all, unique. Now back to me sitting behind my desk at work, I realized that I probably wasn’t going to be able to come up with a cool domain name in such a short time, so I decided just to go with ustoopia.nl. The day after that, I now had my very first, legit, domain ever! So now what?

Not knowing yet what to do with the domain, I mostly used it just for e-mail at first, including a mailing list that was actively for a couple of years, purely for sending funny things to friends and family. The domain was bare, so no dedicated web hosting or anything included. So it was nothing more but the domain name, and control over the DNS configuration for it, and it pointed to an IP of the company. If my memory serves me well, I soon set a cname for www.ustoopia.n to point to my personal space on the company server. That looked something like http://iae.nl/~andre. I can’t remember what I uploaded to it, but since it only supported HTML, it wasn’t anything special. Probably an “Under Construction” page or something like that.

Back then, old or defective computer hardware that was discarded by others, often found its way to me. Therefore it didn’t take too much effort to build a working machine by combining a bunch of old hardware. That’s how my very first (web)server was born, that I was self-hosting from my home. The server didn’t have a case, and was simply spread out on a wooden plank. Far from ideal, a bit dangerous, but it worked out just fine. I figured that hosting a website myself, from home, would be fine with my brand new coaxial internet connection by Chello, that was ultra-fast, for that time. The hardware itself would be the bottleneck, not the connection. I’m talking about a Pentium III 500MHz here, with 512 Megabytes of RAM, and 20 gigs for storage. I’m not 100% sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it initially ran on Windows 98. I didn’t have a lot of experience with Linux yet, so I went with what I already knew. So, Windows 98 as operating system, with OmniHTTPd as web server software. Along with PHP and MySQL. I knew that Windows 98 was not exactly the best solution, but I went with it at first.

It didn’t take very long until I managed to download a pirated version of Windows 2000 Server, which was an actual server operating system. So I installed it, again, this time with OmniHTTPd, PHP and MySQL, and I was happy with this solution. During all this, I was of course learning a lot about web hosting, but also about HTML and PHP, and working with databases. For a long time, I was simply fiddling around with what I could do with all of this. The first forum that I hosted was very actively used by me and my friends. I found it all very interesting, and this interest became a big motivation to keep learning and to keep doing new things with that knowledge. This has never really changed since then. Nowadays, I can confidently say that it doesn’t matter what it is, I’ll be able to host it. Even when it means fine-tuning my server by installing some obscure Perl add-ons, or recompiling a customized build for Apache or Nginx. An example that proves this statement is that a much older version of this website was recently brought back online, that you can check out in the archives, when we celebrate our 25th anniversary.

Timeline

This timeline shows all the milestones and some unimportant events related to ustoopia.nl in chronological order. It starts on November 29th, 2000, which was the date when the domain name was registered.

Wrap it up

And with that lengthy timeline reaching the here and now, it’s a wrap! You’ve reached the bottom of the page. Congratulations! Not many people make it this far. So, if you did, thanks for reading, and thanks for your visits. You are one of the reasons that made this website to what it is today, and I really appreciate you for this. Hopefully we’ll see you here again, sometime.
Gr