The Samurai Archives
Where It Came From
Starting in 1999, the Samurai Archives Japanese history page was developed by C.E. West and F.W. Seal. R. Noelle, a friend of West's, was trying his hand at running a web server over his cable internet connection from his apartment, and offered to host a website. West, remembering the utter lack of useful internet sources on Japanese history during his thesis on Oda Nobunaga in 1997, thought that a Japanese history website would be a neat idea. At the time, Seal was more interested in WWII history, and declined for a time, but eventually came around. The first handful of biographies were taken from notes originally researched by C.E. West during the summer of 1998 during slow periods at work while he was working for Maui Divers in Honolulu, HI. Most of this initial research came from Warrior Rule in Japan by Marius Jensen.
The Original Plan
The website itself was not planned out per se - the unconscious intent was to just keep putting up information until there was just so much there, it would meld into a cohesive whole. That never really happened, and it eventually became more of a "Sengoku History" page, rather than an all encompassing Japanese history page. The assumption was that as the page grew, interest would grow as well, and we would find contributors eager to help build the page - in essence, the original thought was the same concept of a Wiki, however, at that time the software didn't exist, or if it did, we were not aware of it. Unfortunately, this concept never really came to fruition until the "Guest Articles" section was christened with the first article, Kawari Kabuto and the Great Warlords of the "Sengoku" by Augie Rodriguez in October, 2000. The section name was later changed to "Featured Articles" in mid 2002, and articles by F.W.Seal were added, to make the section more comprehensive and directly related to the rest of the website. It wasn't until the addition of the Samurai Wiki in August of 2006 that the true potential and intent of this website could be reached.
The URLs
The Samurai Archives has been through a few URLs over the years. The original URL was essentially an IP address followed by ~kitsuno while it was hosted on R. Noelle's home server.
The Big Crash
Because the traffic was getting to be too much, the website was moved from R. Noelle's home computer server to a free online host at http://samurai.bigsitecity.com/ [1] sometime in 2000. It was hosted there until the host server mysteriously crashed without warning in late July or early August of 2001. Because some images were not backed up, there was some irretrievable losses, including some clan kamon and genealogy images. Repeated attempts to contact the host (bigsitecity.com) got us nowhere, but since it was a free hosting site, there was not much we could do, so we moved yet again.
Angelfire to Samurai-Archives.com
The next URL was http://www.angelfire.com/realm/kitsuno01/. [2] The Samurai Archives stayed there until samurai-archives.com was purchased in June, 2002, and the new website was set up with the hosting company Hostway in early December, 2002.
The website stayed with Hostway until August, 2006, when the size of the Samurai Archives and amount of traffic warranted a move away from Hostway to a far more competitive company, with approximately 18 times more available webspace, and more reasonable prices.
