Starting at 8000 was purely an arbitrary decision to sequentially number the ports to make it obvious when a server was running on a port yet no tests were being made against that server instance.

If you look at the [0fc962 test/connect_test.js#L24-83](https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib-connect/blob/0fc962e42db1927f1df4099f27fcfba8f9b882c6/test/connect_test.js#L24-83) and [0fc962 Gruntfile.js#L37-90](https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib-connect/blob/0fc962e42db1927f1df4099f27fcfba8f9b882c6/Gruntfile.js#L37-90), you will see 7 servers but only 4 test suites, with a mix of ports in the 8000 and 9000 ranges.