**Our journey** started back in 2013 when most of the serious WotLK servers begun switching to Cataclysm (due to obvious financial reasons — new expansion = new stuff to sell). At that time, me and my best friend @Clone still loved playing the good all 3.3.5a, so the idea of creating our own little world got very attractive to us. It was then when I got into WoW development and emulation and I started researching everything related to this subject. With the desire to create something beautiful and reliable that would make me proud, for over a year I silently followed the development of the WoW Core, watching and learning how stuff worked, and waiting for everything to become stable enough for us to start building. That moment came in the spring of 2014, when everything was getting solid enough for [Storm-WoW](http://storm-wow.com/) to become a reality. However, it wasn’t until September of the same year when we really got satisfied with the way everything turned out, and after more than 140 of our own tweaks and fixes, our dream came true and Storm-WoW was live. Hooray! For us it was a major achievement, and we couldn’t be happier with the end result. Our old friends from the former Ghost-Net Community (/salute) shared our joy and love for the game and in no time the [Storm Community](https://www.facebook.com/stormwow/) was born. For a while everything went smooth, with no hate, no rage, no frustration (I know, too good to be true), it was just us playing as friends and having fun. But things begun to go south after about 4 months when the server really started to get some traction, with an influx of new players from all over the world. It was then when we learned the hard way that with fame also comes sorrow… In February 2015, disaster struck. The first DDoS attack hit and while we and our host managed to mitigate it and keep the server running, it wasn’t until a second attack hit (more powerful and from a different source), when our host decided to pull the plug and close our service. So my friends, we found ourselves without a host and with our dreams shattered — an unexpected killing blow... **Why didn’t we recover?** The short answer is finances. For us to rebuild the server it would have meant to get a powerful hosting service with DDoS protection, a service that was priced at over $150 per month. Sadly, we couldn’t afford it… **What changed?** As time went by, we grew older (and not wiser), but our desire to retreat in our little fantasy world never faded away. We have a lot of memories of times when we didn't have a care in the world, except going to school, playing WoW and having fun. Those memories are here to stay, and for us it's a blessing to be able to experience them again. So thank you Blizzard for this wonderful game, and thank you **Stormers** for making this journey possible. See you all [in-game](https://storm-wow.com/register)! 8)