I had to think bigger and found a partner in the USA, a company system administrator loved the Voodoo Guru website and wanted to help out. Within a week we got back on our feet at 'The Game Deli', and the Voodoo Guru was hosted from there on a (for the time) fast T1 (1.5 MBit/sec) connection. And it's where things got bigger and started growing.

We now land at the year 1999. I felt a strong need to diversify the website, as there was just so much to report yet I created a big stigma being a Voodoo graphics only website. Along these lines, to prevent stereotyping I figured a rename and repositioning of the website would be the proper thing to do, as so many technologies were emerging.

After a discussion or two I decided to register Guru3D.com, which was created on the 24th of May 1999, ten years ago today.

Roughly late 2000 it was clear that things were going bad with 3Dfx, and other companies were up and coming. My timing therefore was perfect.

After 2000 Guru3D.com became large, we started to become a hosting platform for exclusive tools. Back in 2001 Alexey (Unwinder) joined up at Guru3D.com, and ever since we've been really hard at work to make Rivatuner the best, diverse and most popular graphics card overclock application on the web.

But what happened after 1999? The hosting challenge...

Well an awful lot happened really. The choice of creating a wide and open technology platform resulted in a massive boost of our reader base. Back in the day, our initial professional host, The Game Deli, had to halt its services.

Being a gaming technology related website we signed for hosting with a company called Playnet. They were developing a massive online war and battlefield game (WW2 on-line) and wanted to support us. That lasted a year and a half, then we got a couple of days notice that Playnet would pull the plug from hosting. They filed chapter 11 bankruptcy and it looked like Guru3D was coming to an end, as hosting was very complex and expensive in those days. A very poignant timeframe really. At that time I had to stop with Guru3D.com, as there was no viable hosting solution at hand. Once the servers had been powered down, Guru3D.com died and was offline. One of the saddest moments in the history of Guru3D.com

But ... being Dutch and very stubborn:

We were offline for a few weeks, yet somehow I managed to find another partner who could offer competitive hosting. Dutch based. After a little while, Guru3D.com was back online.

The new hosting however was a complete disaster. Failing servers, bad bandwidth, horrible backbone and a lot of finger pointing to each other with no solutions at hand. I had to make another decision. It took me six weeks to find yet another solution, which we found in the more permanent US based RealGN.com, here Guru3D.com found a solid home and hosting. These guys knew what they were doing and understood our needs. Here we went dedicated with two of our own servers.

Until 2006 that is...

RealGN again was the victim of a bad economy and they could not survive as the hosting market was just too competitive. Guru3D dumped a lot of cash flow into the company to keep hosting up and going, yet the owners simply did not want to continue. We again had to seek a new hosting solution.

At the time Guru3D.com was closely connected with PlanetMirror, a massive hosting solution based in Australia. And after talking with them we agreed to a good deal hosting wise. At this time I figured we'd invest into three new servers and have them co-located in Australia.

So the three new servers arrived in the datacenter, they were installed and we got the website up and running from that location... and then disaster struck. PlanetMirror management got fired for bad results and the entire PlanetMirror LTD platform was eliminated. This was three weeks (!) after we got our hosting up and running there, literally someone pulled the power cable from all servers. I went berserk... completely nuts.