B10[mg]

I bet a lot of geeks like me are curious what it takes to launch and manage a successful website. To answer these questions, I'll contact the owners of such websites and just ask them :-)

Today, the first episode about: 30 Boxes (which is also one of my favourite websites at the moment). 30 Boxes offers users a calendar system that is rather quite impressive. Usability seems to be the main goal, which results in an intuitive calendar that actually makes it fun to update. Add some command line scripts to it and you can say you have a successful website!

They host their servers at The Planet (or so it seems).

Nick of 30boxes.com was so kind to answer the following questions:

1. When did you start with 30 Boxes and what made you think of this idea?
The three of us (Narendra, Julie, and myself had the simple need of seeing each other's calendar to schedule social things and vacations together, and we needed on-line access to we could see them from anywhere (work, phones, friends houses, etc).

2. Google's 'tag-line' is "don't be evil", what is yours?
"It's Your Life" is the primary tagline. Sometimes we use "Life inside a box isn't all bad".

3. How many people are currently involved in operating this service?
3

4. How many users (approximately) do you currently have?
85,000

5. How much bandwidth would you say your users generate?
Don't know.

6. What is used for operating your site (amount of servers, operating systems, CPU/RAM, programming languages.)?
2 quad-proc Intel servers with 2GB ram each.

7. What made you choose the programming language(s) you're currently using?
PHP, Mysql, Linux. Free, enormous support available. Easy to use.

8. What are the future plans for 30 Boxes?
We have finished most of the product development we envisioned and will focus on gaining more users and collaborating with other services.

The fun part -to me- is that only 3 people can generate a product like this, which definately blows away the competition (like Yahoo! and Google). Well done and keep it up!

30boxes