Shacknews

From its humble beginnings in the early days of online video game coverage over a decade ago, Shacknews has grown to become one of the interweb's leading gaming sites. Shacknews covers games across every major platform with well-researched news and in-depth previews and interviews, and is home to a large community of dedicated gamers who actively discuss news and feature content.

The fully-independent Shack network also includes FileShack, offering high-speed downloads of demos, patches, game movies, and more; Shackspace, providing registered users easily-accessible web storage; and Shackmail, offering full-service webmail accounts. Shacknews and its associated sites reach millions of gamers every month with the work of a small but dedicated full-time staff.

History

Shacknews was founded as sCary's Quakeholio in 1996 by Steve Gibson, as a website dedicated to id Software's then-upcoming Quake. Over the years, the website evolved and its coverage scope expanded. A random discussion with friends about the general direction of the page and its content led to its rechristening as Shugashack. After several years of frequent misspellings and some amusing but unsavory assumptions about the kind of content one would expect to find on a site with such a moniker, the brand became Shacknews.

Technology

The Shack crew is extremely proud of the technology developed for Shacknews and FileShack. All of the code featured on the network is written in-house with PHP and C++.

Shack sites are marked up in semantic XHTML 1.1, and its presentation is driven purely by CSS, keeping pages quick to load and easy to maintain.

Shacknews runs its primary sites off of an Apache2 and SQL cluster housed in Dallas, Texas. Nine file mirror servers are distributed across the United States and Europe, with expansion to Asia and Australia planned within 2007.

Shacknews uses the Limelight Networks CDN service for additional image hosting.