FiatSpider.com

My Father loved toys. When I went off to college, he decided that he had to have a Fiat Spider sports car. I think I loved that car more than he did and drove it every chance I got.

Dad's spider is long gone, but I had always said that the minute I get a house with a garage, a Fiat Spider was going to be the first thing that gets moved in. In 1996, that’s exactly what happened. I got my own 1983 Fiat Pininfarina Spider.

In 1997 The Web was only 3 years old and there was very little information online about Fiat Spiders. Given the fact that at the time I had a web design and development company, I decided to change that. After all, I wanted to fix up my car and I wanted to communicate with other Spider owners and enthusiasts. FiatSpider.com, .org and .net were available so I purchased those domains and built a very modest forum site. The site began to get traffic right away and before long I was getting plenty of great information on the car.

Within a short amount of time, FiatSpider.com began to gain critical mass. I had to upgrade servers, software and bandwidth to handle the growth and demand. During hurricane Isabell, we lost power and the site went down. You would have thought that it was an international crisis by the number of e-mails and calls I got from the site's users from around the globe, all in a panic because FiatSpider.com was down. We bought generators and got it back online.

Fast-forward twenty years. FiatSpider.com has become one of the most significant repositories of information on the Fiat Spider in the world. In addition, this is one of the largest collective and organized group of Fiat Spider owners anywhere. Currently there are more than 258,000 posts on over 32,000 topics all having to do with the Fiat Spider. Every aspect of the automobile is covered in some form or another by some of the world’s most respected vendors, authors, mechanics and enthusiasts all having to do specifically with the Fiat Spider sports car.