The Rowan Amateur Radio Society has had a web presence since the mid 1990′s when club member, and later the clubs first female president Carol Maher W4CLM hosted and maintained pages dedicated to the Rowan ARS on her own personal web space supplied by her Internet Service Provider. Due to space restrictions she used a third party to store all the clubs photographs. Unfortunately, that company went belly up and an alternative method was needed to store the pictures and hopefully host a whole web site for the club.
In January of 2000 Club member Luke Hamaty KK4LH discovered a service called QSL.NET. They offered FREE ad free web hosting for Amateur Radio Operators and Clubs, so Luke reserved a spot for us using the clubs only call sign at that time “W4EXU”. Being consumed by a busy schedule, Carol asked if club member Herb Goodman KF4TVi would be willing to do a web site for the radio club similar to the one he did for the local astronomy club (www.astrowan.org) using the space allotted by QSL.NET, he agreed and was honored to be asked.
In September of 2000 a new dedicated web site for the Rowan Amateur Radio Society was unveiled, hosted by QSL.NET and it was reachable by using the now defunct URL (http://www.qsl.net/w4exu). Thinking that URL was a bit hard to remember, the Domain Name W4EXU.NET was obtained and the site was now accessible using (www.w4exu.net) which is still usable today and currently redirects you to this site www.rowanars.org, which your at right now.
Unfortunately the QSL NET offering was too good to pass up and nearly every ham and amateur radio club on the planet signed up for a free web site and that created a huge strain on the servers which resulted in some very slow page loads and the web sites hosted there were frequently not accessible at all. To their credit they have since fixed those problems by moving to new servers. Unfortunately, we had already made the move to our own new servers with a new hosting company in 2007. That pretty much brings us to where you are now; however, big changes are said to be underfoot with our hosting company and we should see significant improvements with site performance sometime during 2010…at least that is what we’re hoping for.
If you have questions, comments, or corrections regarding the Rowan ARS and/or our web site, feel free to contact any of our officers or you may use the form on our contacts page to contact our webmaster directly. Thank You and 73.
