Where’d the names come from?
So, we’ve been asked a lot of times over the years where the names of our company and our servers came from, and since I haven’t had enough coffee this morning to do a good tip post yet, I thought I’d make a post about that.
DrakNet doesn’t really stand for anything or imply anything all that interesting - in 1996 and 1997, we were essentially a micro-hosting company without a name. In 1998, my son was born, and in the summer of 1998, I decided that the hosting clients and hosting services needed their own identity. Like everyone else, I searched for that very short name that hadn’t been taken yet, and looked for wildly varying combinations of words. I finally settled on drak.net which is simply a modification of my son’s middle name, which is Drake, without the e. It was short, to the point, and an open identity since it wasn’t a “real” word.
Our servers are all named after Pokemon - we currently have Squirtle, Blastoid, Warturtle, and Mudkip. When we upgraded all our servers in 2006, the above-named child was very into Pokemon, and was also taking an interest in the company that was named after him. Since its a family owned business, we decided to let him come up with the new server-naming scheme (which had been mighty boring, with host1 and host2, etc.) and he came up with a Pokemon scheme as well as the specific Pokemon names that would be assigned to the servers.
Yes, for those of you that are Pokemon fans, Warturtle should be Wartortle, and I spelled it wrong. Cut me a break here, he was 7 and I didn’t know squat about Pokemon other than the fact that we have cards everywhere. It sounded like “warturtle” to me when he said it.
As for our logo, it’s a symbolic representation of a dragon - dragons were originally all over our site, but we toned it down over the years. We still wanted a logo that somewhat represented our original dragon-focus, and so we came up with a very simple logo-like triangle.
For accounts, most were not named after something with the exception of the Jaz and Drake accounts. The Jaz account was named after Jaz Gordon, one of our clients, after we asked for input from folks as to what account allotments that would like to see, and she came up with such a complete and exacting list that we used it exactly and she came up with it, and then named it after her. The Drake account was, obviously, named after the kiddo and we thought that it would be the most popular account, being the median specs offered - but it turned out Jaz was more on the ball than she knew and the “Jaz” package has continued to be our #1 package for 8 years.
So, if you ever wondered, now you know!
Tags: company name, names, server names
LOL! Actually, I have wondered about the Drak part but always forgot to ask!
[Reply]
DrakNet replied on April 26th, 2008:
Well, if Drake Industries hadn’t gotten drake.net first, we woulda been that.
[Reply]
Janice on April 26th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Erm, not to be too anal-retentive about it, but one of the other servers is incorrect as well - it’s Blastoise (similar to tortoise), not Blastoid. I’m guessing the same kid-translation mechanism was the source.
I’m on Squirtle, by the way…
[Reply]
DrakNet replied on April 26th, 2008:
See, this is what happens when you let a six year old name your servers.
But, um… I named that one… after an extinct type of stemmed echinoderm. Yeah, that was it. I knew it would be unique. Or something.
(throws up hands) I have mis-named servers. There. I said it.
[Reply]
Michael Schechter on April 26th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
I’ve always loved the company name.
[Reply]
Peter on May 5th, 2008 at 5:41 pm