On May 26, 2005 AnimeAMAZE Internet Radio was born. What started out as a hobby to share music with friends while chatting and playing games turned into a bit more. While the concept was still the same idea, the music we shared with friends while chatting and playing games grew into a bigger community and a place for everyone to meet new people or spend time. From 2005 to 2018 AnimeAMAZE promised
- Commercial Free Internet Radio with community support
- Hand selected music
- Family friendly programming
- Well moderated, friendly community
While I believe we kept our promises there were some situations that were well out of our control. System stability and system maintenance was becoming an increasingly difficult task that required time and dedication that we were unable to provide due to locations of servers and computers. These locations had restrictions that only allowed us onto the premises at certain times of the day. In 2015/2016 one of our servers that hosted the streaming side of the radio shut down, causing a scramble to find a new service provider, but eventually even those services became increasingly harder for us to monitor and maintain. These changes of how they were hosting our services and changing locations ended up leaving us in the dark. Through lots of stream URL changes and location shuffling AnimeAMAZE listeners had to seek out new streaming URLs, and directory listings removed our streams. Due to these reasons, the only decision we could come to was to shut down AnimeAMAZE. While I didn’t want this to be goodbye forever there was a lot of uncertainty around if we could/should start things up again.
After a few years and changes in life, the decision to bring back AnimeAMAZE was considered. However, in order for AnimeAMAZE to come back we had to do it the correct way. Back in 2005, I threw the station together without a clear plan of execution and focus. Sure enough it was not as smooth and made the station feel experimental at times. This time we want to focus on doing things the right way. By utilizing proper security, more tools to keep everyone informed, and maintaining the station, time was spent to make sure we had a clear plan. With that being said, AnimeAMAZE is in a better position than ever before.
We have servers being hosted directly on member/partner premises (The Mono Room for example) with a solid connection to provide the stream and the broadcasting box is back on location. We are committed to keeping users and listeners up to date about any potential issues that may affect our services such as planned maintenance, weather information for areas that are hosting AnimeAMAZE services, and general connectivity or performance issues outside of maintenance windows. We have monitoring that will alert us to downed services, something we did not have in the past, and we have solid plans to provide a backup in the case of service outages.
In the past AnimeAMAZE also had some really strong roots with gaming communities as well as anime and manga fans. We plan on continuing that support and coverage with gaming community events and even gaming specific streams. We plan to offer this on our own live video feeds. This is all going to be relatively new to AnimeAMAZE as well our partners, so stay tuned for more details.
We are really excited for where the future of AnimeAMAZE is and we are excited to see you all there. We hope to build a strong community.