eOldal.hu

» see eoldal.hu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The headline on the front page in 2008 read "Saját weboldal gyorsan és ingyen!" Your own website, fast and free. Underneath: do you want your own homepage, you can make one with us in three minutes, completely free, all you have to do is register. This was a Hungarian product for Hungarian speakers and it never had any reason to cross a border, which is why it is probably new to you and was certainly new to me.

The best surviving record of what eOldal actually held is its own catalog, which sorted member pages into categories and printed the subcategories underneath each one. Animals got dog, cat, bird, horse and aquarium. Games got Sony PlayStation, Nintendo, simulators and logic puzzles. The women's section ran recipes next to horoscopes, the holiday section listed Lake Balaton, and the sport section had football, basketball, winter sports and then kocsmasport, which translates as pub sport and is doing a lot of quiet work in that list.

It was run by Central Médiacsoport, the Hungarian media business that used to be Sanoma Media Budapest until the Hungarian management bought it out in 2014. By the early 2020s that company was shedding the digital products it no longer wanted, and it had already sold off the Citromail webmail service. eOldal was the next thing on the list.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the czech engine ~

Every member site on eOldal had an archive at paths like /archiv/mesic/2008/2 and /archiv/rok/2008/3. Those are not Hungarian words. Mesic and rok are the Czech for month and year, and the logout link on the front page was index.php?akce=logout, with akce being Czech for action. Run the same query against estranky.cz, the Czech DIY site builder, and its member subdomains return the identical /archiv/rok/YYYY/M structure.

So the Hungarian product was the Czech platform wearing a Hungarian name, and nobody bothered to translate the URL scheme. One of the oldest surviving subdomains, a-h-galeria.eoldal.hu, was crawled in March 2008 and is a Fate/stay night image gallery, filed under /fotoalbum with the Czech archive paths underneath it.

~ the notice nobody outside hungary saw ~

The shutdown post went up on blog.eoldal.hu on 7 October 2022 and cited paragraph VIII, point 4 of the terms of use. Services would be withdrawn on 1 February 2023, so they were usable only until 31 January. Already-published sites would stay up for the remainder of whatever subscription had been paid, but no later than 31 January. Anyone with a paid plan running past that date would get the unused portion refunded pro rata. New contracts had stopped being possible on 1 October.

Media1 picked it up five days later, having found out from the hosting newsletter rather than from any announcement. The instruction to users was the one that always comes at the end: download your texts and your images through the admin panel before the deadline, because from 1 February these are deleted permanently and there will be no way to restore them. User accounts were deleted on 31 January 2023.

~ three lives of one domain ~

eoldal.hu is older than eOldal. Between 2003 and 2005 the address served an English-language shop called Arcus Web Developments, offering complex web development and preconfigured Unix servers to Hungarian businesses. Then it goes quiet for two years and comes back in October 2007 as the site builder.

Today it is on its third occupant. The domain answers 200 with a Hungarian web agency under the eOldal.hu name, promising to turn your ideas into digital reality, sitting on top of a content farm of posts about scraping and proxies. The logo is new. The product the name was built for has been gone for three years.

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