UESPWiki:History

History 
This is a brief history of the site over the ages, at least as I remember it. Much of the early details and dates are vague as there are no records available anymore.

Summer 1994 - First Glimpse of Arena: My first experience with the Elder Scrolls games was with Arena on a friends computer. I remember the scene well: A cityscape at night with snow slowing drifting down between the street lights. While I was just beginning to get into PC computer games at the time, I was seriously impressed. I actually want to push this date back further (almost a year further in the winter of '93) but that would be before Arena was released so I'm assuming my memory is just failing me.

Fall 1994 - Bought Arena: I was bored one weekend and was in a small computer shop which just happened to have one copy of Arena as one of its dozen games. It was all downhill from here... This was the second game I ever bought (the first being Doom).

Fall 1994 - Started Daggerfall FAQ: After playing and being very impressed with Arena, I started frequenting the Usenet newsgroups and soon found out about Daggerfall which was in early production at the time. Seeing the general lack of knowledge on the game I started a text FAQ for Daggerfall which was distributed regularily on Usenet.

Winter 1995 - Daggerfall FAQ Grows: The FAQ grew quickly and two other people joined me in gathering information and editing it (I'll have to dig up their names sometime).

Summer 1995 - Daggerfall FAQ Website: Early in the life of the WWW, the text FAQ was converted into a web page at www.newforce.ca/~jackel/.

Fall 1995 - UESP Born: After some discussion/ideas with the other two editors of the FAQ, I created the UESP web site to include information about all the Elder Scrolls games. It was shortly after this that the two other FAQ editors dropped out of sight.

Fall 1996 - Daggerfall Released: If I got the date right, this was a very busy time and the UESP expanded considerably with Daggerfall information.

1997 - Site Moved: I moved the site to the donated www.honesty.com/~jackel/ site (thanks to Moose) once the newforce server started charging based on bandwidth instead of a flat monthly charge (it would have increased the site fee from something like $10 to over $100 a month). I'm unsure of the exact move date.

2000 - Site Moved, Again: Due to problems at the donated honesty site, I moved to the donated www.m0use.net/~uesp/ site (which had its network connection graciously donated by Bethesda, thanks!). Again, exact date is uncertain.

January 2004 - Site Moved, Again: After m0use being down for a few months, I purchased and moved the site to the www.uesp.net domain on a virtual server hosted by Canaca. Hopefully this will be the last move for a while. 

February 2005 - Started Change to Wiki Format: After much research and testing, I decided to move to a wiki-based site. This lets the ES community add and edit the site content as the site has gotten so large I cannot devote enough time to properly maintain it.

November 2005 - Moved to Dedicated Server: With increasing load due to now being a Wiki as well as Oblivion's release date approaching the site outgrew its virtual server. I switched to a fully dedicated server from iWeb in Montreal which increased the monthly cost from a mere $10 to $100. Typically load on the current server is 10-20% so there is a good amount of room for future growth.