Emory Rowland of Clickfire.com is one of the legitimate good guys out there in the web development and hosting world today. He has also been around as long if not longer than some of the other big names in our business.

How did you get your start on the Web?

Emory: My path into the web began in the mid 1990′s. I was a fairly uninspired surfer and email user until I discovered online multiplayer gaming. Meeting others and competing with them in a virtual world fascinated me. I spent a lot of time gaming back then when I should have been reserving domains like games.com. Looking back, I guess you could say that playing multiplayer games was my first online social networking experience. But, instead of the polite introductions we have with today’s social networking sites, you broke the ice by joining a game and chasing people around, taunting and blowing each other up.

Soon, I started building my own user maps. The next thing I knew I was learning to create graphics, then my first Web site which was a Duke Nukem fan site that had an address of something like someurl.com/~emory/dukenukem/, then writing PC game reviews for Gamezilla and UGO and just generally enjoying the whole Internet experience.

Who is the bigger star, Emory or Clickfire?

Emory: The best way to answer that question is by comparing the number of people who stop by my place to visit (friends, magazine salesmen, mailmen, etc) with the number of people who stop by Clickfire to visit. Emory might get one visitor per month. Clickfire gets many thousands. Clickfire can serve a lot more people than Emory ever could. It really makes you think about the leveraging power of the Internet. I could be standing on the street outside my home with a sign that said “Free 100 dollar bills” and I’d never get as many visitors, solve as many problems or meet as many cool people as Clickfire allows. Creating and maintaining my own Web site has has been one of the most enriching of life experiences.

Across Clickfire.com you cover lots of different web developer topics and discussions. What is your favorite area of the massive tent of web development and why?

Emory: I am still having a great time playing around with RSS/XML. Every major social site these days has a feed for the mashing. WordPress has individual category, post and comments feeds. I like to pull pieces of them from my own site and present them on a static page. Then, there is the mobile side, which I haven’t even begun to experiment with yet.

I would say you’re one of the longest running webmaster resources, with your roots going all the way back to 1997. What has made you want to stay in the game so long?

Emory: I enjoy it. Why I enjoy it is something I’ve thought about a great deal. I like having my own “place” online where I can do creative stuff like writing reviews and building free tools. Visitors read the reviews and use the tools and comment; that makes me like doing it more. I can earn revenue by adding affiliate marketing into the mix. So I enjoy it even more. I can increase that revenue with SEO. Now my career is in search marketing and I’m having fun and getting in even deeper. So, I meet even more interesting people like yourself who inspire me to be creative–the cycle starts again.

Are you afraid your going to wake up one day and have the sudden urge to quit and sell shoes at the mall?

Emory: I have no talent outside the Web, so I am sure that will never happen. Besides I can’t sell. I’d probably offer the customer an objective review of the shoes and then give him a pair for free. If I had to make money the brick and mortar way, I’d be broke. Being a webmaster is too much fun.

As far as web hosting goes, which two web hosts out there impress you the most and why?

Emory: You saved the toughest question for last . It seems that all the big shared hosts are offering more bandwidth than you can shake a pipe at. As I’m sure you are well aware, webmastering can be a lonely job and often keeps you up late into the night. If your site goes down at 3:00 AM, you can’t scream. Opening a support ticket online doesn’t seem to satisfy the human need to know that someone is listening and just might care. It’s probably no coincidence that the only two web hosts that have ever won 5 out of 5 Clickfire stars both have 24 hour phone support lines, BlueHost and HostGator. I will say that Lunarpages was the highest rated host we reviewed last year and I really like LP’s pro customer attitude. I am also hosting some sites on HostDime, which I like so far. And HostICan seems intriguing, which we are reviewing now. I think that’s more than two so I’ll stop and bid farewell before I get carried away.

Thanks, Mitch, for giving me the opportunity to share with your readers. And thanks for the free therapy because I have learned some new things about myself now. Keep up the great work with the Web Hosting Show and Mitchelaneous.