How TheSnitch Began
TheSnitch was created by the former webmaster, Gary Hodsgon. Below is an extract from Gary, in regards to how he founded TheSnitch:
Well I suppose I was a late starter to Harry Potter, being I had the opportunity to read as far as Goblet of Fire all in one go. Like most older readers (I was 17) my little brother twisted my arm and told me I had to read them and whoosh I was hooked.
Well imagine my excitement when I found that a Harry Potter movie was starting production and me being a total movie nutter, I hit the web right away and went looking for anything I could find. I came across some fantastic Harry Potterwebsites that had some good devotion to the movies as well as the books, such as HPGalleries.com and harry-potter-movies.net. Sadly both websites are gone now, but they had a huge impact on my decision to start a Harry Potter movie website. I felt that there were really no good websites just for the movies and so I set about writing down 50 website names and no 27, TheSnitch was the winner. I met up with a girl online called Kayleena during my construction phase who already had a Harry Potter online RPG and together we finished TheSnitch and opened on May 1st, 2001.
TheSnitch changed ownership in November 2007 and is now run by former co-webmaster’s, Raadhika Madala and Stefan Marseglia. With both of them being staff members at TheSnitch for a good number of years, they plan to carry on with Gary’s legacy to make TheSnitch one of the most informative Harry Potter websites available.
Four Reasons Why It Hasn’t Been Fun!
There have been many trials and tribulations with the running of TheSnitch over the years, including:
1 – Being kicked from 17 hosts for overuse of server resources.
2 – Losing all of the content twice.
3 – Coming close to shutting down, due to large hosting bills.
4 – Getting hacked three times and having the website defaced with porn!
TheSnitch Statistics
Opened :-
May 01, 2001
Re-opened :-
November 2007
Average Monthly Hits :-
9,000,000
Average Monthly Bandwidth Use :-
300GB
Server Space Used By The Snitch :-
29.7GB
Officially closed :-
February 01st, 2018
TheSnitch Featured In….
To our knowledge, TheSnitch.co.uk has been mentioned in two popular Harry Potter guides. Here are the books and our little snippets in each.
TheSnitch.co.uk – An excellent, all-round, U.K.-based website; this one is worth your time and attention.
The Snitch: http://www.thesnitch.co.uk – Founded in 2001, The Snitch is a great resource for fans, especially for those of the Harry Potter films. News, trailers, photo galleries, cast information, release dates, you’ll find it all here!
TheSnitch Through The Ages
Below are screenshots of TheSnitch website during the years that it has been around. You can see as time has gone by, that each design of TheSnitch gets better and better and we still continually strive to improve TheSnitch for members’ benefits!
Our Domains
Our Hardware
From November 2007 onwards, TheSnitch was powered by the companies 1and1 and EasySpace.
TheSnitch Server Specifications
CPU – Single Core AMD Athlon – 2.2Ghz
OS – Fedora Core 6
Harddrives – 2 x 160GB HDD’s
RAM – 1GB
Monthly Bandwidth Quota – Unlimited
Thank You
A very big thank you to Thomas Branch for the original design of TheSnitch’s official Snitch logo.
TheSnitch had been searching for a logo of it’s very own for some time and after Gary got in contact with some of the fantastic artwork that Thomas was posting in the fan art section of TheSnitch’s forums; he asked if he could produce a Snitch in his own style.
If you would like to view more work by Thomas you can view his work at DeviantART via TSBranch.
A Final farewell
I have always loved the world of Harry Potter and first delved into this magical world back in 1999.
I first joined TheSnitch as a newsposter in the early 2000’s and this started to fuel my passion for the world of journalism which ultimately led me to embark in reading journalism at university.
I then began to help Gary expand the website by adding new content and sections and this led to many amazing opportunities.
I was given the chance to attend the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix set and interview the cast and crew; attend premieres of the movies both in London and Los Angeles; report on red carpets; attend the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park at Universal Studios during construction and interview the team behind the expansion; review Harry Potter-related books; visit Electronic Arts and review the Harry Potter games and much more!
My most proudest achievement of TheSnitch was making and meeting a group of life-long friends. I have been able to make friends from around the world, many of whom I still speak to on a regular basis now!
From November 2007, I took over TheSnitch full-time after Gary decided that it was time to move on. Since then, I have tried my best to keep the website as up-to-date as possible, however doing this independently has been a struggle. Plus, the cost of keeping such a massive website open has not been easy.
Nevertheless, I have pushed on for 11 years and have enjoyed every single minute of it.
Sadly, 2018 was the year I realised that financially and logistically I would not be able to operate TheSnitch in a way that I had been doing so for the past 11 years.
I do hope that one day I will be able to re-open TheSnitch as I know J. K. Rowling has kept the Potter world alive through the theme parks, theatre shows and Fantastic Beasts movies. However, for now, TheSnitch will be taking a break and closing down.
I wish all of you the best and keep on enjoying the world of Harry Potter! 🙂
The Snitch 