Mp3Crib.com was a popular free mp3 hosting application from 2007 through 2008.  At its height hundreds of gigabytes of data were transferred each month with tens of thousands of mp3 files hosted.  The service boasted thousands of members, several hundred actives per month, and received several hundred unique hits per day.  Mp3Crib.com owned the number 3 spot in Google for search terms such as “free mp3 hosting.”  All this was operated out of my apartment closet, with a DSL line, a 7 year old PC being used as a server running Debian Linux (I kindly named this server Kernel).

The Idea

I first conceived the idea for a mp3 hosting web application in the later part of 2006.   Having lost well over 1,000 music files on my previous computer and being robbed of all my CDs in an vehicle burglary I witnessed a need for a safe and reliable place to store my beloved music.  Backup services were expensive and didn’t allow for playback, creation of playlists, and any other neat features mp3crib.com would soon provide.

At the time I was employed as a Network Administrator for small medical billing software company in Draper, Utah.  I had very little programming experience, mainly in Visual Basic 6, which even at that time was considered an outdated language.  I had a background in HTML and CSS as a hobby since I was ten years old, that was it.

A Beginning

Being a motivated, relatively intelligent guy in his early 20s with a knack for all things computer I hit the library and checked out a book on PHP 5 and MySQL 5.  With some help a long the way I began teaching myself how to program.  I was confident at this point to begin some Alpha versions of Mp3Crib.

This is when my search for a suitable domain name began.  I originally wanted to name the service “Song Goose” but both songoose.com and songgoose.com were taken.  Eventually I came up with  “Mp3 Crib. ” The owner of Mp3 Crib, a certified domain squatter if I ever heard of one, wanted $400.  I instead elected to purchase mp3-crib.com for around ten bucks.  I informed the domain squatter I was no longer interested in the mp3crib.com domain.  Later that day I had mp3crib.com (no dash) for $40 dollars, sneaky me.  Nine months later Mp3Crib was a fairly stable and popular web 2.0 application with users around the world.

The Problems

I quickly learned that operating a bandwidth intensive site was going to require an upgrade in my bandwidth, unfortunately the best I could do was a business class DSL line.  This made a nominal impact.  At the same time the 900 Mhz, 512 MB Ram server I was running Mp3Crib on was being overloaded and suffering from memory exhaustion.  My Dad chipped in on a new quad core server (named Kahuna) with 4 GB of RAM, and a terabyte of SCSI disks.  The main problem was still my bandwidth.  A T1 was only nominally better than my business class DSL and would triple my bandwidth costs.

Investors

Around January of 2008 I was approached by a local entrepreneur.  Great guy, but he really didn’t have the capital to afford moving Mp3Crib into a data center.  Option B was to move it too one of his offices that had access to a business class Fiber optic network, unfortunately the office was too far from the main Fiber optic line.

The next investor was an old friend of my Dad.  The guy was fully on board, had his own datacenter and 10 MB backbone (10 times what I had at the time).  Things were steamrolling, he sent a second server out to me.  After configuring the server and transferring data I shipped the server out to New Jersey where the investors data center supposedly was.

The End

Repeated calls were made with no answer.  Had the investor lost interest or  stole my code?  Too this day I have no idea.  I think the investory simply lost interest and lacked the business etiquete to inform me.  I think its unlikely that he simply wanted to steal the code as an intermediate to awesome programmer could write Mp3Crib in 3-6 months and probably do a better a job  (yeah I’ve gotten a lot better at programming since then).  The real value in the application was the domain name and where it ranked in Google.  Actually to this day if you do a Google search for mp3crib you will see forum posts about it.  I decided to keep onto the domain name and the site laid dorment from May 2008 until now in January 2009.

The Future

I learned a lot from Mp3Crib.   I learned how to program which later landed me a job as a web developer.  I learned what it takes to setup a popular web 2.0 site.  I learned about how to plan for growth.  I learned lots of other things a long the way.  The biggest thing I learned is when you pour hundreds of hours into something that’s your baby, that’s your conception, that’s part of you like Mp3Crib was of me, that you never want to place its fate in the hands of someone else.  I learned not too trust a business person who only sees dollar signs, you need to make yourself that business person and see your idea through to its ultimate success.  I will take this knowledge with me in life and my future endeavors.

There really is no future for Mp3Crib.  There are several other popular music hosting applications out there now.  Several of which I will be reviewing on this blog.  I have no plans to bring back mp3crib (though I still have copies of the code, web design, and database schema).  If you interested in obtaining copies of the code, design, database etc… contact me and we may be able to work something out.  If you are interested in purchasing the mp3crib.com domain chances are slim, but you may contact me.  I welcome any former users of mp3crib to contact me and last I apologize for the music you may have lost but hopefully I have explained the circumstances well enough and you will understand my situation.

Thanks for reading.