About
Why this exists, and who keeps it
An archive of the free web hosting era, written by someone who spent twenty years inside it rather than reading about it afterwards.
The keeper
This archive is kept by Chris Lever, who launched StoneRocket in 2005 and also ran GigaRocket. StoneRocket peaked at around 30,000 visitors a month and 5,000 forum posts a month, asked ten posts a month of its users, ran no adverts on their sites, and was funded by forum advertising, link sales and a cheap premium tier. It was sold in 2012, acquired in 2013 by Bondings of Frihost, and was gone by 2015.
That is a normal story for this era, which is exactly why it is worth telling properly. Most of the hosts in the graveyard were one person and a server, and almost none of them wrote anything down.
The domain is itself an exhibit
post2host.net was not chosen because it was available. It was one of them.
The Wayback Machine holds a capture of forums.post2host.net from July 2005, with the main site appearing that October, which places it in the field the same year StoneRocket, Frihost, HelioHost and Freehostia all started. Real content runs to roughly 2009. After that the captures degrade into parking pages carrying a pay-per-click feed, and it stayed that way until about 2021 before dropping entirely. It was registered again in July 2026 to house this archive.
We do not yet know who ran the original site or what it offered. If you do, please tell us. It would be a poor archive that could not document its own address.
How this archive handles evidence
Every entry in the graveyard states where its information came from, and entries are marked according to how well sourced they are. Where something is thin, the entry stays short and says so rather than being padded out with a plausible guess. Nostalgia writing is unusually prone to inventing tidy dates, and a museum that does that is worse than no museum, because the invented dates get cited.
If you find something wrong here, it will be corrected. If you can evidence it, it will be corrected with attribution.
Contribute to the archive
The gaps in this archive are not in the famous hosts. They are in the dozens of small ones that ran for a year or two on a single box and left almost nothing behind. Specifically, we are looking for:
- Names of post2host hosts not yet in the graveyard, however short-lived
- Screenshots of panels, forum front pages, signup pages or account emails
- Backups, database dumps or exports from any host of the period
- Operators and moderators willing to be interviewed about what actually happened
- Anything at all about the original post2host.net
- Corrections, with a source
Prefer email? hello@chrisleverseo.com
Is this nostalgia or a prospectus?
Honestly, both, and it would be evasive to pretend otherwise.
The archive stands on its own: this history is genuinely being lost, the forums that held it are mostly gone, and the people who ran these services are drifting out of the industry. That is reason enough to write it down while they can still be asked.
But the keeper of this archive is also weighing up whether the model can be rebuilt, with a currency that is not forum posts, since text stopped being scarce. If that happens it will happen under its own name and not this one. This domain stays neutral, because an archive that is also a shop window is neither.