Published at LXer:

When istockphoto.com launched in February 2000, the images in its database were available free of charge, and the entire company ran on one server with an Access database. "At that time, traffic was very low," says istockphoto.com Executive Vice President Patrick Lor. In 2002, the company moved to a fee structure and wanted to increase traffic. "We came across this amazing thing that looked like enterprise-grade software, called MySQL." With that and PHP, they re-coded the entire site, and in 2002 sold 154,000 images at 25 cents each. "We went to two generic servers and had an amazing year," he says. "That was our first real exposure to fee structures and the reception was incredible."

Read More...