On October 31, 1996, a Portuguese journalist in Dallas, Texas, registered a domain name: rogerle.com. Thirty years later, RogerLe.com is still online, still independent, and still run by Roger and Le.
Thirty years, in a few lines
- 1996. rogerle.com is registered in Dallas, to host websites for the Portuguese-speaking community in its own language.
- 1999. Rede Globo chooses us to run the chat for Malhação, the first Globo program with its own chat room.
- 2000. INFO Exame names RogerLe.com the best hosting provider for the Portuguese-speaking market.
- 2006. The platform moves from Perl to PHP.
- 2026. Our own billing and helpdesk replace third-party systems, the help center launches, and this website is rebuilt from scratch.
What stayed the same
No investors, no corporate parent, no buyer waiting in the wings. It has been that way for thirty years, and it is a choice we keep making.
Support is still a person. Roger is available 24/7. That is not a promise to answer in fifteen minutes. It is a fact: a human reads every message, and answers as soon as he can.
Where we are now
These days we run RogerLe.com from the road. Roger, Le and Jolie, our toy poodle, travel across Europe in a motorhome. The servers stay where servers belong, in data centers, and we reach them from wherever we are parked that night.
We also work with a small crew of AI assistants, each with its own job: design, code, review, the daily care of the servers. This article was drafted with one of them. The decisions are still ours.
Thank you
To every customer who has trusted us with a website, a mailbox or a whole business, some of you for most of these thirty years: thank you. You are why we are still here.
“ Thirty is just a rounder version of twenty-five.