EVOWOW began as an experimental idea in April 2007 and gradually grew into a long-running World of Warcraft project.
The original idea came from M. Petrov (MeKeTa).
The project started with one of the older emulators available at the time, Wow-Emu 1.8, running on MeKeTa's home computer. That was how EVOWOW welcomed its first players, ready to face Illidan and the other challenges of World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.
It did not take long for the limitations to become obvious: the resources of a home computer, the lack of continuous uptime, and the stability problems of the emulator itself.
At that point I proposed moving the server to a dedicated machine hosted by EVO.Bg and replacing the emulator we had been using.
Here is EVOWOW's first dedicated machine:
The server moved to Windows Server 2003 as the operating system, Mangos Project as the emulator, and Project Silvermoon for the World Database. At the time, the project was hosted at http://wow.evo.bg/.
Within only 3–4 months, what we had initially considered sufficient could no longer handle the influx of players looking for a well-maintained Burning Crusade server. Once the population passed roughly 120 concurrent players, the server began to struggle badly with lag, crashes, and freezes.
July 2007. We moved again, this time to more powerful hardware. Unfortunately, I no longer have photos of that machine. The resource problem was solved for a while.
February 2008. I proposed raising money for our own server hardware, and the response was far greater than I expected. In less than a month, the community contributed 1,000 BGN. The original plan was for the company where I worked to match that amount so we could buy a significantly better machine, but that never happened.
Rather than disappoint everyone who had supported us, I used the collected funds to purchase one server and paid for a second identical machine myself.
After a small upgrade, the two machines had the following configuration:
BIOS Information
Vendor: FUJITSU SIEMENS // Phoenix Technologies Ltd.
Version: 4.06 Rev. 1.08.2532
Release Date: 04/04/2008
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Hardware Info
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Product Description: Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX100 S4 - Xeon 3040 1.86 GHz
Cache Per Processor: 2 MB
Cache Memory: 2 MB L2 Cache
Form Factor: Rack-mountable - 1U
Type: Server
Dimensions (WxDxH): 43 cm x 56 cm x 4.3 cm
Weight: 12 kg
Processor: 1 x Intel Xeon 3040 / 1.86 GHz (Dual-Core)
Hard Drive: 2 x 500 GB - removable - Serial ATA-300
Networking: 2 x Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
Power: AC 120/230 V (50/60 Hz)
RAM: 4 GB (installed) / 8 GB (max) - DDR2 SDRAM - ECC - 667 MHz
Storage Controller: Serial ATA (Serial ATA-300); IDE (ATA-100)
Optical Storage: CD-RW / DVD-ROM combo
Server Scalability: 1-wayA photo of the machines from that period:
This upgrade changed the future of the server. With help from I. Vachkov (core-ix), a close friend of mine, we made several additional optimizations that allowed the system to support up to roughly 500 concurrent players without running into system-resource problems.
Two years later, in June 2010, I purchased the domains evowow.com and evowow.net, followed later by evowow.org. The idea was simple: this would be the first step toward making the project fully independent.
November 11, 2010. Our new website went live. Built from scratch, it offered almost everything a WoW player could need at the time: a gallery, statistics, FAQ, Wiki, Armory, a voting system, and Voting and Donate Points shops.
Over the years, many of the Bulgarian World of Warcraft servers from that period disappeared. EVOWOW went through many changes as well, but the idea behind the project remained the same: to maintain and develop a place for the people who want to play here.