History

How my lemons became your LemonAid.

My name is Gregg Mendez, and I am the founder of AmbitiousLemon. In the winter of 2000, while an undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley (Go Bears!), I decided to stop simply being a viewer of websites and instead dive into the wide world of web development. I created some crazy looking sites in those early days, but eventually I created something that people could actually stand to look at long enough to read the content. And LO and behold, people were actually interested in reading what I was writing.

Due to the amount of traffic I was attracting, I realized I was going to need some help with the site. Brandon Kish came to the rescue and started helping out. With his help the website start pulling in serious bandwidth and quickly outgrew the limits of shared hosting. We needed our own server, and we needed it fast. In August 2002, Brandon's friend Tommy Young (tireless linux guru) began working with us to get a server built. Soon I, with the help of Tommy, had built my own server suitable for colocation.

The colocation package we got was so generous that we ended up with surplus bandwidth. Despite the server's initial construct as a server for a single website, Tommy figured out a way to start serving the websites of our friends and family. As life took me, and those who were helping me, in other directions, I reluctantly closed my site down - and with it the whole reason for having a web server in the first place...

But by that time we were hosting many other websites, and Tommy and I switched our focus from serving our own sites to providing free hosting for others. To accommodate our new focus on free web hosting, Tommy rolled out a massive server upgrade and the AmbitiousLemon version 2.0 was born. That was 11 May 2004, and since then we have continued to run, maintain, and develop the server with a commitment to providing free non-profit web hosting with a community atmosphere.