The Clock That Digg Built

This story begins back in 2006, the year in which Online Clock was born.

The first version of Online Clock went live on March 24th, 2006.

But it wasn’t until about a month later, on April 25th, 2005, that Archive.org first began indexing the world’s first online alarm clock website.

The people behind our Online Alarm site are simply humble web developers who had a great idea. (How we came up with this idea is a story unto itself which will be touched upon in a future blog post!)

The idea of creating an online alarm clock, a website that could be used as an alarm clock directly in your web browser, is a big one. We knew it would be a success as soon as the idea came to us. So it’s not surprising that hordes of imitators have sprung up over the years…

In the beginning it took about six months for things to start taking off. For several months our alarm clock site was online, but no one really noticed it. Then slowly some Spanish-language bloggers somehow discovered and began blogging about us.

But then suddenly, things took off, and they did so with a bang…and this is something that we’ll never forget.

And the truth is: we had nothing to do with it.

On September 6th, 2006, someone posted a story about our online alarm clock on Digg.com. On the very next day, this story made it to Digg’s front page and the world has never been the same for us since!

We can remember that our servers went down at least three times while our story was on Digg’s front page. Our web hoster at the time, once we’d contacted them and explained the reason for the huge sudden increase in traffic, did a valiant job of getting the server back online and keeping it online.

Screen Shot of the Digg Story that started it all!

As a result of getting on the front page of Digg, hundreds of people with blogs wrote blog articles about the world’s first online alarm clock…and our business was suddenly off and running.

It didn’t take long to discover that the new visitors OnlineClock.net received from all these blog posts kept coming back to use our alarm clock again and again…and that the idea of a browser-based alarm clock was an idea whose time had come.

Shortly after the immediate traffic rush was over, and the story about Online Clock had disappeared from Digg’s front page, our web hoster told us politely that we had outgrown their services and should instead seek a dedicated server somewhere else.

Since then, we’ve outgrown at least three other web hosters…which, we have learned, is one of the “problems” of having an extremely successful website: you must keep scaling your hosting power upward. We’ve now come to accept this “problem” and we now even welcome it, each time such a change becomes necessary!

We at Online Clock would now like to sincerely thank Digg.com and all the people who have blogged about us, posted stories about us, or in any other way shown their support for us over our three year-plus long history.

Thank you for making OnlineClock.net a big success!

We look forward to being your favorite alarm clock for a very long time to come