Hosts, directories and forums from the free hosting era, what they asked of you, and what became of them. Each entry carries its sources. Where the record is thin we say so rather than invent a date.
Era
Fate
StoneRocket
Closed
2005–2015 · United Kingdom · stonerocket.net
10 posts per month
The post2host pioneer this archive is written from.
Launched in 2005 and grown into a genuine community rather than an ad farm: no adverts on the hosting, PHP, MySQL and cPanel, paid for by keeping the forum alive. At its peak it drew around 30,000 visitors a month and averaged 5,000 forum posts a month, with hosting funded by forum advertising, link sales against the forum's standing in the PageRank era, and a cheap premium tier. It was sold in 2012 and acquired in 2013 by Bondings of Frihost, who had been in the same business since 2005. The new owner mothballed it, and it was gone by 2015.
The longest surviving post2host service, and still standing.
Founded in April 2005 by a Belgian IT specialist known only as Bondings, who built and programmed it in his spare hours as a student. Five quality posts got you an account. Frihost ran at full strength from 2005 to 2012, when post2host accounts were in real demand, and its forum was among the most active of the era. Demand fell away after 2012 and the admins and moderators drifted off one by one. Bondings kept the domains alive and the accounts hosted on German servers. It is a shadow of what it was, and it is still a going concern, which makes it the last one standing.
Compiled from secondary sources listed below. Corrections welcome.
The domain this archive is published on. 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 puts it in the field the same year StoneRocket launched. Real content runs through to roughly 2009. After that the captures turn into parking pages, with the tell-tale signs of a pay-per-click feed, and it stayed parked until around 2021 before dropping entirely. It was registered again in July 2026 to house this archive. We have not yet recovered enough of the original site to say who ran it or what it offered, and would like to. If that was you, get in touch.
Fifteen posts, the steepest quota of the well-known hosts.
Known as FFS. Acquired by Bondings in 2013 in the same deal that took StoneRocket, and run to the same specification as Frihost. Where most hosts asked for five or ten posts, FFS asked for fifteen quality posts before it would give you an account at all. Still active, on a much smaller scale.
Compiled from secondary sources listed below. Corrections welcome.
For years the largest and best known of the post-to-host community hosts, with a forum that ran from the mid 2000s well into the 2020s. The community survived, but not untouched: as social media took hold the forums stopped being the centre of gravity, sections were merged and others hidden, and the boards settled into being the support venue rather than the main event. That transition, from community to helpdesk, is the post2host story in miniature.
Compiled from secondary sources listed below. Corrections welcome.
The second of the two brands run by this archive's author. The domain is still held. Its full history is being written up from the operator's own records rather than from the public web, and this entry will be expanded rather than guessed at.
Thinly sourced. This entry is deliberately short until it can be verified.
Not every post2host host was students and hobbyists. A parallel scene advertised on webmaster and game-server forums offering offshore hosting with a deliberately relaxed attitude to what you put on it. It is part of the record. It is also part of why free hosting acquired the reputation it did, and why the abuse problem was never a footnote.
Thinly sourced. This entry is deliberately short until it can be verified.
Started in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet, organising personal pages into themed neighbourhoods. Yahoo bought it in 1999 at the top of the market and closed the US service in 2009. It established the idea that an ordinary person could have a page on the web without paying anyone, and its closure was the first time the web collectively noticed that free hosting was not permanent.
Compiled from secondary sources listed below. Corrections welcome.
Began at a college in 1992. Switched off in April 2026.
Started at Williams College in 1992 and launched its consumer free hosting in 1995. Lycos bought it in February 1998 for fifty-eight million dollars. Around 2001 it carried roughly six million registered pages. It then ran, quietly and largely unloved, for a further twenty-five years. Lycos posted a thirty day shutdown notice on 6 March 2026 and the site became inaccessible on 24 April 2026.
Compiled from secondary sources listed below. Corrections welcome.
Launched in 1996, oddly, as a combined website builder and medical transcription service. WhoWhere acquired it in October 1997, and Lycos acquired WhoWhere in August 1998, putting it in the same hands as Tripod. Its homepage went offline on 24 April 2026. Between them, Angelfire and Tripod hosted millions of personal pages, fan sites and half-finished webrings, and their closure in 2026 marks the formal end of the era this archive covers.
Compiled from secondary sources listed below. Corrections welcome.
Founded in 2001 as Freewebs, later just Webs, offering free and paid site building to a generation who wanted a page without touching FTP. Ended up owned by Vistaprint, and was shut down on 31 August 2023 with the homepage turned into a redirect that September.
Compiled from secondary sources listed below. Corrections welcome.
Not a host. The noticeboard the whole scene advertised on.
The oldest institution in this archive. It opened in early 1996 as The Free Homepage Guide, a single page of about twenty-five links to free hosts with short descriptions, hosted by a Swedish free host called BIP. It became the directory and forum where free hosts announced themselves and where users compared them, and it grew to more than 130,000 members. If a post2host host existed, it almost certainly advertised here. It is still online, which makes it older than most of the companies it catalogued.
Compiled from secondary sources listed below. Corrections welcome.
Established in 2003 and still operating, on the freemium model rather than the community one: a genuinely usable free tier as the top of a funnel into paid plans. Unglamorous, and it outlived nearly everything in this archive.
Compiled from secondary sources listed below. Corrections welcome.
The one that solved the funding problem by not pretending.
Founded on 2 March 2005 by Ashoat Tevosyan and granted 501(c)(3) not-for-profit status in 2017. No adverts, no sales gimmicks, no posting quota: it runs on donations and word of mouth, and says openly that it lost money in seven of ten years. Its servers are named Johnny, Ricky and Tommy. Tommy came online in late 2016 and free signups on it have been known to fill in seconds. It is the clearest proof that free hosting can survive for two decades, provided somebody is honest about who pays.
Compiled from secondary sources listed below. Corrections welcome.
Ad-free, founded the same year as Frihost and StoneRocket.
Established in 2005 as an ad-free free host, later broadening into VPS and dedicated servers. Part of the 2005 cohort that defined what a free account was expected to include: PHP, MySQL, and no banner across the top of your site.
Compiled from secondary sources listed below. Corrections welcome.
Free hosting at scale, and the breach that defined its reputation.
Founded in 2007 and grown into one of the most recognised free hosts on the web, offering PHP, MySQL and no adverts to millions of users. It was owned by Hostinger. In October 2015 it was revealed that around 13.5 million user records had been taken, with passwords stored in plain text, in a breach that had happened roughly five months before disclosure and was attributed to an exploit in an old PHP version. It is the single most cited reason people give for not trusting free hosting, and it is the reason this archive treats security as part of the history rather than an appendix.
Compiled from secondary sources listed below. Corrections welcome.
An iFastNet service, and notable for what it did about control panels: rather than pay per account, it shipped VistaPanel, its own cPanel-shaped interface. That decision, taken across the iFastNet family, is the single most instructive response to the licensing problem in this whole archive. When the panel became the cost, they wrote their own panel.
Compiled from secondary sources listed below. Corrections welcome.
What free hosting looks like now: no forum, no quota, no community.
Launched in 2013 by iFastNet and reported to host over 400,000 active sites as of 2026, with 5GB of space, unlimited bandwidth, MySQL, SSL, full .htaccess support and current PHP. It is a better free hosting product than anything in the post2host era offered. It also asks nothing of you and gives you nobody to talk to, with support handled through forums that exist to answer tickets. It is the strongest argument that the thing which died was never the hosting.
Compiled from secondary sources listed below. Corrections welcome.
Dozens of post2host hosts ran for a year or two on a single box in somebody's bedroom and left almost no trace. Most never made it into the Wayback Machine at all. If you ran one, used one, or moderated for one, the archive would rather have your memory than a gap.