Since they are reborn, they must be supported by the school beauties.

Chapter 52: All Funded by the School Beauty
After dinner, the two took a taxi to Electronic City.

In 2002, sales of electronic products were entirely offline.

Therefore, every prefecture-level city basically has an electronics city where many businesses gather.

From computers and servers to headphones and MP3 players, you can buy everything in the electronics mall.

After dinner, the two took a taxi to the electronics city for a stroll.

Lu Youyou was not interested in these things, so she quietly accompanied Chen Cheng as he walked around and looked around.

Chen Cheng took her to visit several laptop brand counters.

At first, Chen Cheng was interested in IBM's ThinkPad-T30, but it was too expensive, costing more than yuan.

Computers are updated very quickly, so there is no need to pursue the top configuration.

So, he settled for the second best and decided to buy a high-end Lenovo Zhaoyang V66.

This configuration is a little worse, but it is several thousand yuan cheaper and has a better cost-effectiveness.

While Chen Cheng was bargaining with the boss, Lu Youyou quietly asked Chen Cheng, "Do you prefer the one that costs more than 20,000 yuan? Why don't you just buy that one? I can lend you an extra 10,000 yuan."

Chen Cheng smiled and said, "That one is good, but the price/performance ratio is still not high enough. Computers become obsolete quickly, so there's no need to pursue the latest and greatest configurations."

Lu Youyou whispered, "I'm afraid that after you settle for second best, you'll feel uncomfortable when you go back."

Chen Cheng was touched and smiled, "Don't worry, I have thought it over carefully."

Lu Youyou nodded and stopped talking.

Chen Cheng talked with the boss for a while and finally bought the Lenovo Zhaoyang V66 for yuan.

After Lu Youyou paid 14,000 yuan with a credit card at the counter, she withdrew 6,000 yuan in cash for Chen Cheng.

While Chen Cheng was thanking him, he sighed in his heart:

Unexpectedly, the start-up capital for my business in this life was actually funded by Lu Youyou.

He left his computer at the counter and downloaded some necessary software online. He and Lu Youyou went to the electronics city to look for HiChina's agent.

Registering a domain name is not difficult in later generations and can be done directly on a mobile phone.

However, there is no online payment at this stage, so these local middlemen are needed to provide assistance.

They use an agency mechanism and have prepaid or postpaid agreements with HiChina.

So, you just need to pay them cash and they will register the domain name on your behalf immediately, which is more efficient.

Otherwise, Chen Cheng needs to submit a registration application first, and then go to the bank to transfer the money. Only after the other party confirms receipt of the money will the domain name be transferred to his name. This process will take at least two or three days.

Chen Cheng found a service provider that seemed reliable and asked them to help register the domain names xiaonei.com and qiche.com.

The domain name on campus was not registered, but it was registered soon.

To be on the safe side, he registered another lianshu.com.

However, the domain name "qiche" was just registered by someone in July this year.

So Chen Cheng registered the two domain names autohome and dongche.

autohome is the domain name of Autohome.

However, this domain name is a bit difficult for people who don't understand English.

The domain name of dongche can be understood as understanding cars, which is concise and to the point.

Chen Cheng thought, never mind, just grab both the names of Autohome and Dongchedi. Domain names don’t cost much anyway.

He planned to focus on the campus network first.

After all, I am a college student now and have natural advantages.

Jiangnan University alone has 30,000 to 40,000 college students, who are definitely the best initial users.

You can first promote the campus network at Jiangda University to attract initial users to join.

With the way that Xiaonei.com finds people through graduates and current colleges, once it can lay a foundation of tens of thousands of users, it will quickly undergo fission.

Everyone has high school classmates who are studying in universities all over the place. This fission growth trend is generally exponential.

At this stage, college students have no other platforms except playing games and QQ, which is a good opportunity for the rapid development of this kind of product on campus!
After registering the domain name, Chen Cheng rented a shared host with decent performance and bandwidth for two hundred yuan per month.

However, this shared server, which costs only 200 yuan a month, has a relatively low load capacity, with limited performance and traffic. These days, renting a dedicated server is too expensive, starting at 1,000 to 2,000 yuan a month.

Servers and bandwidth will be one of the major expenses for future startups. Once the number of users reaches tens of thousands, server costs will rise sharply with no upper limit.

For large video websites like those in later generations, the annual server bandwidth costs are in the billions.

Chen Cheng doesn't plan to waste money for the time being. He will use a shared host to deploy the website first. Once the website is online and traffic increases, he can switch to an independent server at any time. If one server is not enough, he can add more.

The next thing to do is to go back and build the website, then deploy the built code to the server, and then resolve the domain name so that users can access it online.

A computer, four domain names, and a server cost a total of more than 15,000 yuan.

Chen Cheng said to Lu Youyou, "Xiaolu, I'll take the remaining money first. I'll pay you back as soon as I make money!"

"There's no rush."

Lu Youyou said, "Just focus on your own things. If you need any money, just tell me. I still have some savings."

"Okay!" Chen Cheng agreed without thinking too much.
-
After sending Lu Youyou back to school, Chen Cheng rushed back to Jiangda without stopping.

He didn't rush back to the dormitory, but instead asked around the school to inquire about the opening of the dormitory campus network.

At present, the Internet penetration rate in Jiangnan University is very low. The dormitory network is still in the early stages of construction, and most dormitories do not support Internet access.

However, although the dormitory building of Chen Cheng's School of Computer Science is the most dilapidated in the whole school, at this stage, only the dormitories of the School of Computer Science in the entire Jiangnan University are connected to the campus network.

Chen Cheng found the campus network agent and activated the wired network in his dormitory.

It is not expensive to activate the Internet. In addition to the 300 yuan activation fee, you only need to pay a monthly fee of 60 yuan.

The campus agent is very efficient. After paying the money and completing the registration procedures, they will bring the router to your door and activate it.

My roommates haven’t come back yet. I guess they are still playing games in the Internet cafe.

So, Chen Cheng began to prepare the basic framework of the campus network.

He sorted out the core functions that he wanted to implement in the first version of his own campus network:
The first is to build a personal display page to display personal information, especially avatars, school information, and personal profiles.

Second, it is the publication of personal updates. People search for classmates just to see the personal updates they posted, but these days it should mainly be text, and the product function is similar to the comments in QQ Space.

Third, it is the display of friend information flow. With so many friends added, it is impossible to click on the friend's page one by one to view them, so after logging in, there should be a section for the dynamic display of friends' personal dynamics.

Fourth, there is the in-site messaging function, but it cannot be turned into a clumsy in-site mailbox. It must have a built-in dialog box function that allows direct communication with friends.

Fifth, a light blog function is added, where users can write personal diaries, similar to Sina Blog and QQ Space logs.

Sixth, it is privacy settings. Users can set the privacy of more personal content, including whether it can be seen by anyone or only by friends.

As long as these six functions can be achieved, the early campus network architecture is basically realized.

Moreover, the visual effects and product experience of the early website were very poor, and Chen Cheng could give the product a better experience.

However, there was one function that Chen Cheng was a little hesitant about whether to add.

This function is the electronic photo album.

In 2002, the digitization of everyday video materials was not yet popular, and there was not even any sign of it becoming popular.

Moreover, the first digital photo of the vast majority of Chinese netizens was not taken with a digital camera or a mobile phone, but was taken with a 100,000-pixel camera on an Internet cafe computer.

At that stage, there was a very embarrassing problem with the photos taken by netizens using Internet cafe cameras: they were extremely difficult to save.

QQ launched the video chat function in 03, but the photo album function was not launched until 05 when QQ Space was launched.

In this day and age, the only feasible way to save a digital photo taken with a camera online is to register a 163 mailbox, put the photo in the email attachment, and send it to yourself.

In this way, the photos can be saved as attachments to the email and saved in your own mailbox.

That year, NetEase accidentally discovered that some users of its own 163 mailbox did not use the mailbox to send emails to others, but used it to save photos.

So, they keenly realized that netizens began to have a need for photo storage.

In 2003, NetEase launched the first photo album product on the Chinese Internet, 163 Photo Album.

After 163 Photo Album went online, it remained an irreplaceable photo album tool for netizens in the two years until QQ released its space album. However, NetEase was unable to give it social attributes, making it just a tool from beginning to end.

Chen Cheng realized that if he added the photo album function to Xiaonei.com now, his Xiaonei.com would replace 163 Photo Album and become the first photo album product on the Chinese Internet.

Moreover, this is not just a photo album product, but a social product with photo album functions!
(End of this chapter)