Fairport, NY, October 25, 2008
Fifteen years ago, an e-mail was sent to the Talon-list, an e-mail list for owners of the DSM triplets (Talon, Eclipse, and Laser), and their cousin, the Galant VR-4. Soon, three follow-up e-mails came through. Thus, The Snow Tire FAQ was started.

In the fall of 1994, the Snow Tire FAQ was e-mailed out again, this time to a slightly wider distribution.

As the years passed, the Snow Tire FAQ went from being an annual e-mail to having it's own webpage. Traces of the original hosting site (http://www.frontiernet.net/~werner/snowtire) can still be seen in some search engines. Eventually, the Snow Tire FAQ moved to it's own domain (http://www.snowtire.info), and then finally onto its own web server.

The location of The Snow Tire FAQ was not the only change over the years. In 2001, The Snow Tire FAQ introduced The Real World Snow Tire Tests. Three different sets of snow tires were tested in the Rochester, NY winter. The tires were fitted on real world cars and driven by real people on real roads with real weather conditions. As the years rolled on, the Real World Snow Tire Tests continued on a bi-annual basis.

In the mid 2000's, The Snow Tire FAQ Forums were introduced. These forums were started to allow people to exchange information about snow tires and winter driving in a community format.

All this while, the format of the original Snow Tire FAQ continued much unchanged. Occasional updates were made to the content, but the static html page remained. Then, in 2007, the Snow Tire FAQ was transformed from a static html page to a dynamically updated webpage.

So what of the future of The Snow Tire FAQ?

"Change is the only constant." John Werner, editor of the Snow Tire FAQ, is already evaluating some changes to the online look of the website. "There are several possibilities that are being evaluated -- everything from user adjustable dynamic pages to 'garages' where people can share information about their cars."

There are some things that will not be changing. "The core of the Snow Tire FAQ has been providing information about snow tires -- everything from general information to reviews -- without the bias of advertisement money. No matter how things change, the Snow Tire FAQ will stay true to that."

Additional Resources
Those of you who wish to see how The Snow Tire FAQ has evolved since getting its own domain name may choose to look at the results from "The Way Back Machine" (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.snowtire.info).

The original e-mail sent to the Talon-list can be found here: http://www.dsm.org/archives/1993/199310.txt/18.html

That applies to almost anything, including web sites. Years ago, the quite hope and fear of every webpage developer was the Slashdot effect. If your site got written up on slashdot, you were assured that you would get thousands if not tens of thousands of daily visits. It also meant that if you were also setting yourself up for blowing the cap off your server's bandwidth limit.

The Snow Tire FAQ didn't get written up in slashdot, but over time it has gotten popular enough that the traffic has increased. Yesterday (October 22, 2008), it passed what I thought was a reasonably high (and safe) cap, and it got automatically shutdown.* I believe I have solved the problem for now, but I will be keeping a close eye on it as The Snow Tire FAQ enters it's most popular months.

Sorry for the inconvenience,
- John