On October 31, 1996, in Dallas, Texas, a Portuguese journalist who had traded his notepad for a Linux terminal registered a domain name: rogerle.com.
The web was two years old in any meaningful sense. Most businesses didn't have websites. Most people had never heard of hosting. The word "cloud" still meant weather.
Why hosting?
Roger had discovered the internet in 1994 while writing a story about it for a magazine in Lisbon. Once he was online, he never left. He taught himself Linux, Perl, and server administration from books — there were no tutorials in Portuguese, no YouTube, no Stack Overflow. Just documentation, determination, and a dial-up connection.
He saw a gap: the Portuguese and Brazilian communities had almost no hosting options in their own language. The big American providers didn't speak Portuguese. The few local options were expensive and unreliable. Roger decided to fill that gap himself.
The name
RogerLe.com. Roger and Le — because from the very beginning, this was a partnership. Le wasn't just the wife of the founder. She was the co-founder. Every decision, every direction, every late-night debugging session — they did it together.
The name says it all. It always has.
Day one
The first server was hosted at ISI — Internet Servers Incorporated. The site was hand-coded, tag by tag, in a text editor. No frameworks. No templates. Every line of HTML written from scratch.
That server is long gone. The company is still here. Thirty years later, still running, still independent, still built by the same two people who started it.
“ Internet para quem acredita.