So I did some googling about the history of this glorious website, & It's early years are quite interesting!
Here's the oldest recorded capture of www.e621.net from the Internet Archive, a mere 6 days after it first went live.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070216005307/http://e621.net/
At that point in time, there was only 403 pieces of artwork on the whole website. Now, that number is up to 4,240,433!
There were quite a few haters at this time period. The site was actually taken down twice, the first time on September 17th, 2007.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070917160028/http://e621.net:80/
However, it went back online on November 26th, 2007; Now under the name "e621 2.0".
https://web.archive.org/web/20071203215454/http://www.e621.net:80/
The other time was on August 30th, 2010; Though sadly an archive of the website at that time doesn't exist, at least not on the Wayback Machine. However, we do have a transcript of the note displayed on the website that day.It reads as follows:
" Thanks to numerous threats to our host, false claims of illegal content, harassment and a few things that are much worse, e621 is being closed down permanently. It's been fun running it. If you're looking for an alternative, try dammitfreehaven.com or something. If you want to come in and bitch at us, #e621 on irc.darkmyst.org will be a place you can do that. Or you can yell at me on twitter, twitter.com/ajkirwin or just email [email protected] and scream at me. Whatever.
And to all those who have lied and threatened and caused problems, well, congratulations. You got what you wanted I suppose. One site down, only about, what, fifty thousand left to go?
-- Arcturus"
From that point on, the head honcho was Varka, the new head admin. He's still an admin to this day, actually! Hope you got some useful info out of this blog post, or at least had fun reading it.
-FringleFrangle, Your Pal.
Updated