The earliest start to the main website was early in 1997. I don't have an exact date or even copies of the earliest beginnings. At the time, it was 3 manually created pages - covering only the US.
About 5 years later, on 10 May 2002, the Feast of St. Damien de Veuster, the new domain (Catholic-Hierarchy.org) went live. Statistics are only available from that point.
There are a few points in time when the stats went down for a period of time (server overloads, etc.) - no attempt has been made to correct for those.
By the time the new domain went live, the site covered just the Americas. But that was corrected a few months later when the rest of the world was complete enough to merge into the main site.
The only major area not fully covered at this time is China - due to its unique situation. I hope that will be resolved soon.
So, in 15 years, folks have made 32.9 million visits to the site, viewing 204.5 million pages. For the geeks: that's 560.7 million hits and 3.1 terabytes of data served.
Unique visitors are always a tricky metric, but currently its over 120k a month. In the last month, there have been visitors from almost every country in the world (Google Analytics says 216).
Thank you all for the support and help along the way. I look forward to another 20 years!
