Question: How did Great Feet get started?
Answer
:
In the mid-1980s a core group of us foot fetishists began chatting things up on a (
Bulletin Board System with 16 phone lines in one guy's apartment). Included in that group were people into bondage sex as well as other adult activities such as swinging, etc. Some of us got together in person to enjoy foot fetish fun with women who enjoyed having us pleasure their feet.
In 1994, dial-up Internet service became widely available, thanks in part because the speed of modems had gotten faster. By 1996 when the Internet became mainstream, our group moved to the Internet to connect with each other. We also exchanged foot fetish material via e-mail.
We then decided to centralize things by posting our material on a personal web page of mine, which was officially launched on April 10, 1997. Much to our surprise, the visitors to our site grew so rapidly that it overwhelmed the personal page I used, which adversely affected my
IP (
Internet
Provider). Luckily, the person in charge was pretty cool about it, so they kind of looked the other way.
Still, it wasn't fair to tax their server so heavily, so I voluntarily moved over to a shared server when I registered our domain On February 22, 1998. Coincidentally, that date is ruled by
Pisces (♓︎), which,
"According to astrology, the sign of the fish rules the feet."Because of our heavy traffic, given that our site was one of the only foot fetish sites on the Internet at the time, we kept overloading various shared servers. Our solution back then was to reference all of our contributions on our site, but have them hosted on a number of different contributors' sites, most of which were hosted by
Geocities (
subsequently redirecting to Yahoo's eCommerce platforms, and then shuttered with a landing page called "turbify").
Of course, being that our site was classified as
"adult" and often displayed nudity,
Geocities routinely deleted the accounts of our contributors, which ended up causing a lot of problems to manage.
Geocities was acquired by
Yahoo on January 28, 1999. In the United States it was shut down for good on October 26, 2009. The
GeoCities Japan version of the service shut down on March 31, 2019.
In any case,
Geocities was closing down sites so quickly, and in such large numbers, it just didn't make sense anymore for me to manage all of the images the way I was with so many different webmasters. That's when I decided to host all of our contributors' foot fetish material myself.
For a while, I did this on shared servers, but in every instance our site overwhelmed the server we were on, so it caused problems. I eventually had to put the site on our own server. Even then, web hosts often had difficulty keeping the site on-line without any downtime. It took a while before I found a company that could handle all of our site's activities. I've been with them since May of 2003, so hopefully they'll keep going strong.
I take pride in the fact that this endeavor of mine was one of the first to sustain itself with online ads; one of the earliest pioneers of its kind to test, and grow what's known as
Ecommerce. Ironically, it was never my intention to make a business of it, which happened quite naturally when I was contacted by a popular adult site to display ads for them.
Nonetheless, I never considered our site's foot fetish operations to be a business, as it was simply a personal endeavor of mine. Of course, legally it was a business, and ad revenue was needed to cover expenses. Still, I made the personal choice to never get into the adult business in a formal way even though in the earlier
"gold rush" days of the Internet, a lot of money could be made.
Despite my personal choice to be discreet about my foot fetish endeavors, as I've always been with anything that
floats my boat sexually, I fully support those who choose to engage themselves in the adult business no matter what it is as long as it's consensual.
Being that we still live in a relatively puritanical society, and there are a lot of personal issues that people have about engaging in sexual fun, even if it's just online, I responsibly classified our site as
adult so that any entity that chooses to block it can do so.
It's unfortunate that so many people have hang-ups about sex, especially since those hang-ups are a detriment to one's mental health. As such, foot fetishism is a sexual fetish that a lot of people will think is odd, to put it mildly, which is ironic given that it's evidently one of the most popular, and widespread fetishes of all.
Inevitably, our site will either close down at some point, or it will carry on with a new owner, or group of owners; ideally as a non-profit entity operated by a collective of fellow foot fetishists.
In any case, because privacy has always been important to me as the founder of this site, I give my personal assurance that private information will remain private no matter what the circumstances except by a valid legal order from a recognized legitimate authority.
In other words, no private information will ever be given to anybody.
Not ever!
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