Martnet: If You’re Reading This, You Probably Had A Page Hosted Here
AS TOLD BY JUSTIN GELLER:Back in the days of blazing fast 19.2 Kbps dial up modems, before Amazon, before Google, two guys named Nick had a dream. How can we get a really fast T-1 connection dropped to our West Philly house without paying for it? Start an internet company of course! So in 1996, they created MartNet, selling dial up access and web site hosting to the masses. Risks were taken. One of the Nicks (Schummer) decided to quit
his day and go at it full time. There was tequila, Mountain Dew, and lots of old computers. Old friend Justin Geller joined in somewhere in the early 2000’s. The image was redesigned and reimagined sometime after a semi-threatening letter from Atari (something about copyright infringment). Martnet’s hosted tons of local websites including: phillymusic.com, (the original Philly music guide), Reflective.net (the a long running rave/club message board), and we were the original host of Philebrity, before the flood of traffic became to much for the servers to bear. People always asked us, “Were you hurt when the internet bubble burst?”. Well, first there has to be a bubble for it to burst. We never made a lot of money. We never had a million bucks of venture capital to blow (philly2nite, anyone?). We just did our jobto keep our customers part of the internet going. And it’s still going. Only now it’s pretty much just running itself out of the back of an auto garage in the North East. Which is a whole other story.
