Resentment.org was created in 1998 as the successor to my previous domain Elitehackers.org. After running Elitehackers.org for over 5 years I finally gave up on trying to make people understand that the site was not to be taken seriously. In actuality, the domain was simply a website put up by myself for a few friends and myself to poke fun at certain aspects of the computer hacker lifestyle and the computer security scene, as well as offer some tools. After numerous years of flame wars, user account attacks, DDoS attacks, and many other interesting events at both the hands of opposing hackers and a few federal agencies, I finally gave up on Elitehackers.org and pulled the site down.
When Resentment.org was registered in '98, the purpose of the domain was to be my personal website where I could simply offer download links to some of my tools. As time went by, I continued to work on personal projects on resentment.org, including one of the first Webmail//IMAP interfaces. After a few friends saw my webmail interface, they all wanted accounts for themselves as well as for their friends. A few more hours of development, and I hacked out a quick user database and registration engine and resentment.org's free secure webmail service was born.
After only a few months of accepting free resentment.org webmail accounts, I had over 500 users who checked their accounts daily. It wasn't long after I started the webmail service that many users started asking for other services like free websites. After a few more weeks of development, my user registration engine started offering a free website service to resentment.org users. Within a few months of creating the free website service, it had been adopted by hundreds of users including many in the computer security field.
Over the years resentment.org has hosted thousands of websites including numerous controversial websites. I have been flamed, threatened, sued, arrested, DDoSed, as well as had personal attacks made on my character as a result of my ownership and hosting policy for resentment.org. Resentment.org is also hosted at great personal expense. When I first started running resentment.org, it was run entirely from 1 machine and didn't require all that much bandwidth. Since that time, resentment.org has grown way beyond those needs as the "Resentment.org Network" now consists of 1 Rack, 6 i686 boxes, 3 UltraSparc boxes, 3 laptops, 3 switches, 2 VPNs, 3 firewalls, 5 webcams, 128-bit crypto wireless network, and a few other misc. toys. As I am sure you can tell, all those boxes require bandwidth and power which don't come cheap in Orange County. My power bill each month is around $300-$350, and since cox communications is the only cable provider in my area, and for static IPs you need business class service, my net connection costs me around $250 per month. Those are just my financial costs not including the hundreds of hours I put in each month to help users and build new services.
One question I am constantly hearing is "Why are you doing this?". A very good question. Now, I could go off for hours and tell you all about my views on censorship and privacy, how I believe that everyone should have the right to have a website without intrusive code inserted into your page by your hosting company, etc. But, I am sure you don't want to sit here and read all that (nor do I have the time to type it all out now). So, the short answer is that I am a nerd, what else am I going to do? ;)
J-Dog
