Hello Siddiq,
I'm glad that you're interviewing me, sorry for my bad english, I'm Egyptian, so english is not my first language :)
here are the answers to your questions ...
1) What do you get out of running the site? Money, fame, girls...?
A. well, you can say "ALL" (money-fame-girls), but of course money comes at first place, if I don't get enough money from the website, so what's the point of keeping it alive, hosting costs alot, so if the money didn't cover the hosting costs, it'll be worthless, I'm not very much interested in "fame", but I like to have lots of friends which are also in the scene and I already know many bittorrent website owners and we help each other developing our websites.
2) In a normal week, how much time would you say you put into keeping the site running?
A. ALOT, as much as possible, it's really taking all my attention, time, effort, everything .. It's a very big part of my life and I have to take care well of it, If I can't check the website through PC for any reason, I do it through my cellphone.
3) What kinds of experience did you have with running software or servers before this?
A. file servers and the like ARE fairly complex technology to understand and operate, I used to have a managed shared hosting when my website wasn't quite large, webhosters were doing all the job, i was just uploading the pages and inserting data to the database server.
When the website grew larger and shared hosting couldn't handle the load anymore, I ordered an unmanaged dedicated server, and it took me 5 days straight (no sleep) to set it up with the settings i need, Yea it's pretty hard to manage a server especially when you didn't do it before.
3a) Are you a technical guru, hacker extraordinaire, script kiddie or newbie?
A. I'm a php developer who learned PHP and MySQL from eBooks.
4) With all thats going on in the world of media, what are the things that keep you awake at night? What are the biggest issues facing BitTorrent operators today?
A. Downtime. It's the worst nightmare of any growing-website admin.
5) As an operator of the site you have a unique perspective on what has made
Torrent sites so successful with consumers. What are some of the things that
have shocked, surprised or amazed you about the people that use your
site?
A. Bittorrent is quite popular for being the first protocol to have
the Recent releases, movies are leaked before they're showed in theaters!
.. people goes to my website to search for whatever they want to download
(movie, tv show, pc game) and then download it, they rarely post comments on
torrents and they rarely goto the forums, they only go there when they need a
password for a torrent.
Let me know if you need any answers to more questions you have, also let me know the url where u'll post the interview, Thanks in advance.
Best Regards,
MadnesS