A Little Background Information:
After I completely lost interest in Ashanti and my site, I decided to close it, and start up a Beyonce site. I got the idea of the site name from my friend Erika. Not only after a week after I closed the Ashanti site, I began to work on ForeverBeyonce.com. The first version of the site was actually supposed to be the next layout for the Ashanti site, but I decided to edit it a bit to accomodate Beyonce. After a few days’ work on the layout, I began to work on the actual ontent. I gathered hundreds of photos, installed loads of PHP scripts (news, guestbook, gallery, forum, etc.), and made tons and tons of graphics (wallpapers, avatars, animations, blinks, etc.). Any time I was free, I worked on ForeverBeyonce.

Once I completed about half of the content, I began to promote the site. I made a few buttons, placed them on the Coming Soon page, and applied for affiliation at various fansites. I also promoted at a few popular message boards. After over a month of extensive work, this site was ready to be open. It had a nice layout, great content, and high potential. ForeverBeyonce was opened on December 23, 2003. The day we open, we received nearly 300 unique visitors. To me, that was a HUGE accomplishment because I didn’t realize the many people that already knew about the site. I got lots and lots of compliments towards the layout and it’s unique content.

In March of 2004, this site had to go on a 3-week hiatus because my current host deleted the entire site. His only reason for doing this was that I used too much space and bandwidth. He gave me no notice on when he would delete the account, and left me in a bind. Luckily, most of everything was backed up on my computer, so I didn’t have to start completely from scratch. But now, FB was stuck without a host. At that point, my friend Diva stepped in as my brand new host!! I immediately began working on the new layout (version 3) and the new content that I wanted to add with the official re-launch. In April of 2004, ForeverBeyonce was re-opened with loads of new content and a new layout. Unfortunately, I got really tired of that layout really fast, and released another one a couple weeks later.

Between the months of May and September 2004, we had no major problems as we were on our new server. Our hits began to grow; and so did our content! During those months, we released the all-new Music Videos collection and began to upload MPEGs of television appearances with our newly purchased video capture card. But what were we to do with all of these visitors downloading all of this media using up a ton of bandwidth? I didn’t want to be a burden on my friend (because she was hosting me for free); so I began to implement advertisements to get income from visitors so that I could go out on my own and purchase my own server!

In September of 2004, I purchased a server with a ton of space and a ton of bandwidth to accomodate our heaviliy downloaded media database with Eric. He gave me the server at a really good price that I could afford :P I didn’t think I would ever have to move again. Between the months of September 2004 and February 2005, our number of daily visitors began to grow tremendously. This could be due to the fact that Destiny’s Child had just released a brand new album, and FB was there every step of the way updating fans with exclusive audio & video clips, HQ photoshoots, and more! Little did we know, this growing number of fans would be our downfall for the month of March.

On March 5, 2005, Usher performed a televised concert on Showtime in Puerto Rico. He had many guests perform with him onstage. But one guest was releated to this site: Yes, it would Beyonce herself! We had the video up for download immediately after the concert. But unfortunately, a few selfish visitors leached the videos off of a popular messageboard causing our bandwidth to run up sky high, which in turn, caused the site to be shut down. This was at the beginning of the month, so this meant that our site would be shut down for the rest of the month. Yeah, it sucked… =(

Around the months of February and March, our current host (Eric) was going through some personal issues with his family which caused him to be away from his computer a lot. That meant we really would have to wait until April to regain access to the site. So, once again, we packed up our stuff and moved on to a new (temporary) host. Between the months of April and July, our visitors began to grow even more! We even peaked at nearly 4,000 unique visitors! We knew we had to leave this temporary host and move on to a more permanent solution.

At the beginning of July, we packed up our stuff (hopefully for the final time) and moved on to bigger and better things. Once we moved, I thought to myself, “Wow! How come I didn’t do this sooner?!” Our new host was extremely fast and had unmetered bandwidth. So now we can finally update our media collection without worries of getting shut down because of high bandwidth usage.

It has been well over two years since this site hit the world wide web, and we’re still going strong and growing everyday!! I plan on making this site the best Beyonce site, and most-visited Beyonce site in the entire world. It’s going to be a long, but fun, ride =) I hope you all appreciate and enjoy the daily work that I put into making this a remarkable place for all of you =)

Facts About Me:
Name: Dustin
Age: 17
Sex: Male
DOB: January 18, 1990
Country: United States of America
Beyoncé Fan Since: The Writing’s on the Wall

Facts About FB:
Active Since: December 23, 2003
Counter: Well over 2,000,000 unique visits!
Number of Layouts: 15
Record Unique Hits in One Day: Over 13,000!