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. (The site while much smaller, was substantially the same database driven site as today.)
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. In addition, since May 2020, Cloudflare has been used to help with serving the site's content and any pages served by them are not counted.
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.
China continues to be a unique situation. While all known bishops are listed, much of the information is limited. Also the names/boundaries of jurisdictions has not been resolved (at least in public). I hope that will be resolved soon.
So, in 20 years, folks have made more than 47.5 million visits to the site, viewing over 340 million pages. For the geeks: that's 753 million hits and 4.0 terabytes of data served.
Unique visitors are always a tricky metric, but currently its over 140k a month. In the last month, there have been visitors from almost every country in the world (Google Analytics says 220).
Thank you all for the support and help along the way. I look forward to many more years!
