Timeline
1994 to 2026
Thirty-two years from the first free homepage to the last one being switched off. The post2host years sit in the middle, roughly 2005 to 2013, and they are shorter than most people remember.
-
1994
GeoCities begins
Beverly Hills Internet starts organising personal homepages into themed neighbourhoods. The idea of a free page for anyone takes hold.
-
1995
Tripod opens to the public
Started at Williams College in 1992, Tripod launches its consumer free hosting product.
-
1996
Angelfire launches, and so does the noticeboard
Angelfire opens as a combined site builder and medical transcription service. In the same year The Free Homepage Guide opens with about twenty-five links, hosted by a Swedish free host called BIP. It becomes FreeWebspace.net.
-
1998
Lycos consolidates
Lycos buys Tripod in February for fifty-eight million dollars, then acquires WhoWhere, and with it Angelfire, in August. Two of the three giants end up in one company, which is why they eventually die on the same day.
-
1999
Yahoo buys GeoCities
The peak of the first era, and the beginning of its long decline.
-
2001
Freewebs founded; Tripod peaks
Tripod carries roughly six million registered pages. Freewebs launches for people who want a site without touching FTP.
-
2003
AwardSpace opens
The freemium free host arrives: a real free tier as the top of a paid funnel.
-
2005
The post2host cohort arrives
HelioHost is founded on 2 March. Frihost launches in April. Freehostia and StoneRocket both start. The Wayback Machine captures forums.post2host.net in July. Within one year, the model has its founders.
-
2007
000webhost launches
Free hosting goes mass market, with no posting requirement and millions of users.
-
2009
GeoCities closes in the US
The first mass extinction of personal websites. The web learns that free hosting is a tenancy, not a deed.
-
2012
The turn
Demand for post2host accounts starts to fall away. Paid hosting is now cheaper than a coffee, search engines are devaluing paid links, and the forum audience is moving to Facebook and Reddit. StoneRocket is sold.
-
2013
Consolidation and succession
Bondings of Frihost acquires StoneRocket and FreeFTPSpace from a friend he has known in the business since 2005. In the same year InfinityFree launches with no forum and no quota: the model that wins.
-
2015
The breach, and the end of StoneRocket
000webhost is revealed to have lost around 13.5 million user records with passwords in plain text. StoneRocket, mothballed after its sale, is gone.
-
2019
The licensing shock
On 27 June cPanel, by then under Oakley Capital and later folded into WebPros alongside Plesk, moves to account-based pricing. A server licence that cost tens of dollars a month for unlimited accounts can now cost hundreds. For a host whose entire proposition is thousands of free accounts, the maths stops working overnight.
-
2023
Webs shuts down
Vistaprint closes Webs, formerly Freewebs, on 31 August.
-
2026
The era formally ends
Lycos posts a thirty day notice on 6 March. On 24 April, Tripod and Angelfire both go offline, thirty years after Angelfire launched. In July, post2host.net is registered again to house this archive.
The shape of it
Free hosting had eleven years of growth before post2host existed, eight years where post2host was a genuine market, and thirteen years of long decline afterwards. The model's actual working life, from the 2005 cohort arriving to the 2013 consolidation, was about eight years.
That is short enough that a lot of the people who built it are still working, still reachable, and still have the backups. Which is the entire reason for writing this down now rather than in another ten years.