Cosmo's Factory

General Info:

Domain: http://cosmosfactory.org also known online as Cosmo's Factory.

Creation Date: 10/9/1992 - 10/10/1992 - 3/19/1997

Created By: Jim 'Cosmo' Hetzer (out of spite)

History

On October 9th, 1992, Cosmo presented a version of Rocky Horror on the web to his cast The Denton Affair (of Cincinnati) but they dismissed it as not being something they should waste time on. On December 10th, 1992 Cosmo debuted Cosmo's Factory at www.iglou.com/~cosmo. Due to high traffic to that one domain, Cosmo relied on a friend who also ran a website on Iglou, so early files either came from www.iglou.com/~cosmo or www.iglou.com/~mkking. On March 19th, 1997, Cosmo's Factory officially Moved to cosmosfactory.org.

Random Facts:

• Cosmo's Factory has been on TV twice: a British TV show called Rockets and once on the Sci-Fi Channel.

• In 1994, Cosmo's Factory was sent a cease and desist from Sony Records due to an audio clip on the website of Tim Curry singing a Van Morrison song. It was mailed via snail mail because Sony wasn't using email yet. From what we understood, Cosmo's Factory was the first C&D from Sony toward a website.

• In 2004, Cosmo's Factory had over 18,000 total files. Currently, there is over 27 GB of data under Cosmo's Factory, much of which isn't directly linked to and there for reference or quick access.

• At its peak, Cosmo's Factory's Cast Spin-off Rockycast.net hosted over 100 email accounts and over 130 web sites and redirects, similar to bit.ly does now.

• In 2005, Cosmo's Factory's parent company, The Rocky Horror Preservation Foundation, owned over 100 Rocky-related domain names.

• Originally the Cosmo's Factory main page had a counter which tracked main page hits. Cosmo's Factory stopped counting hits in 1998 and restarted counting at zero. We stopped counting in 2006 at 2 1/2 million front page hits.

• The night Glee premiered their Rocky Horror episode, Cosmo's Factory received 254,000 hits in two hours. RockyHorror.com actually went down due to the high traffic after the show.

• At its peak, Cosmo's Factory would get as many as 10,000 hits a day. Now (2015) Cosmo's Factory gets about 1,500 hits a day.

• In the first 10 years, Cosmo's Factory received so much traffic it was cheaper to start a web re-seller company then to pay for it. CF Multimedia.org begun.

• In the mid 2000's Cosmo started The Rocky Horror Preservation Foundation. It is a non-profit doing free web-hosting for Rocky Casts and Rocky related sites.

• On May, 5, 2000: Cosmo's Factory Chat room The Zen Room went independent and gets its own domain name thezenroomchatroom.com

• On May 5th, 2001: Cosmo's Factory debuted Make-a-Flyer, a (pre-HTML 5/Flash) flyer generator to help casts advertise their shows.

• On August 10, 2000: Cosmo's Factory debuted a section for Phantom of the Paradise, The Lost Boys, A Clockwork Orange, Clue, and Dune under the domain entitled Cosmo's Cult Movies.org

• There have only been two times when Cosmo's Factory was down for more than one day.

• In 2010, Cosmo's Factory's forum (rockycast.net) and its image gallery (imagefolio) were shut down by The FBI & The Department of Homeland Security. I cannot provide more info on this but we helped do our part.

• Although Cosmo's Factory has always claimed to be the largest Rocky Horror Website on the Internet, this isn't exactly true. At this point (2015) with no image gallery, Rockyhorror.org may be larger.

• One reason Ruth Fink-Winter received her Boss Award is because of all the work she did proofreading site likes Cosmo's Factory.

• Although Cosmo's Factory is considered the first Rocky Horror website on the internet, Byron Brummer (Zenin) had an FTP site first. Although he didn't have a webpage or HTML it was first.

• On Oct. 31st, 2015 Cosmo's Factory will bring its gallery back online. The new gallery will have over 11,000 pictures.