Comcast Personal Web Pages

» see home.comcast.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On 2 July 2003 Comcast announced the rebuilt comcast.net, timed for the Monday when former AT&T Broadband customers began moving onto Comcast High-Speed Internet. Buried in the feature list, between the email and the online storage, was this: "Creating, editing and posting a personal web page is easy with Comcast's Personal Web Pages tools." The Internet Archive first crawled home.comcast.net two weeks later.

The arrangement was the standard one for its era, and Comcast was generous by the standards of it. Every email username on the account got 25 megabytes of web space, and the account could hold several usernames, so a family had a hundred megabytes and change if anyone had wanted it. In the summer of 2007 Comcast upgraded the service to a full gigabyte and attached a blogging tool, arriving about four years too late to matter. Business customers got the same thing on comcastbiz.net.

Your address was home.comcast.net/~username, or username.home.comcast.net if you preferred the subdomain. That tilde is the thing to notice. It is Unix notation for a user's home directory leaking out onto the public web, and for about fifteen years it was how a normal person's page looked, a folder on a machine belonging to the company that sold them their connection.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the space was actually for ~

Almost nobody used it for a homepage in the Geocities sense. The traffic that ran through ISP web space by the mid-2000s was mundane and useful: a few photographs for relatives, the scorekeeping page for a bowling league, a club newsletter, the PDF schedule for a church softball team. Comcast had also stopped letting new customers set it up years before the end, so by 2015 the population was people who had configured it once in 2004 and left it running.

That is also what made the shutdown quietly destructive. A page nobody has touched in eleven years has no owner watching for a notice, and the family who set it up may well not have the files any more. The notice Comcast posted was specific about this: retrieve all content currently saved on your site before 8 October 2015 to avoid permanently losing your files.

~ the provider switch ~

The official line was that Comcast was switching to a new service provider in order to enhance its network and give customers the best internet experience possible. What that meant in practice was that hosting customer files was a cost center attached to a product nobody was buying the connection for, and the hosting partner's contract was ending. Comcast was among the last holdouts: most American ISPs had dropped personal web space years earlier, and this was the big one going.

The domain itself hung around afterward in the usual way. home.comcast.net returned a mix of redirects and 404s through 2017, and today it does not resolve on https at all while plain http forwards to an Xfinity content hub.

~ a different relationship with an ISP ~

I have had the same connection from the same handful of Turkish ISPs since the modem years, and at no point did any of them feel like a place I kept files. The relationship was a username and a bill. Free hosting, when I needed it, came from somewhere else entirely, which is a difference in how the two markets grew rather than a difference in what people wanted. The American ISP of the early 2000s was descended from AOL and the regional cable portals and was still trying to be a destination rather than a pipe, and the shelf space in your account was a leftover from that ambition. It outlived the ambition by about a decade.

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