Extra.hu

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

~ the obit ~

Hungary got its free hosting at roughly the same moment Turkey did, and the shape of the thing was identical everywhere it appeared. You picked a name, you got name.extra.hu, you got a few megabytes, and you uploaded whatever you had over a connection that made uploading a decision rather than a reflex. Extra.hu started in 1999, or possibly in the last weeks of 1998, and the Internet Archive's first capture of it is dated 17 January 1999.

It became one of the oldest free hosts in the Hungarian-language web and, by the count in its own closing press release, was carrying hundreds of thousands of active sites at its height. That is a very large number for a country of ten million people. For a decade it was simply where a Hungarian put a page: the band, the class website, the fan shrine, the hit counter that only ever counted you.

In January 2010 the company that then owned it announced that the free tier was finished. Users had until 31 March to move their sites, with a discounted paid plan offered to anyone who wanted to stay. The servers kept answering for a while after that out of what looks like inertia, and then stopped for good in the autumn.

I never had a page on extra.hu, because I am not Hungarian and in 1999 I was a teenager in Turkey on a 33.6k modem with my own set of free hosts to choose between. The distance here is only the language. Everything else about it, the subdomain that was your whole identity online, and then the eventual notice explaining that nothing is free forever, happened to me in a different alphabet at the same time.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

Free subdomain hosting in 1999 was not a product category so much as a land rush. The bet was that a few megabytes of disk cost almost nothing and that the eyeballs would be worth something later, which is the same bet GeoCities made and lost at a much larger scale. Extra.hu ran the Hungarian version of it, with the banner at the top of every page paying for the disk underneath.

The front page in its last years was a signup form sitting next to a "topsites" link, which tells you the operating model exactly. Free hosts ranked their own tenants, because a leaderboard of the most-visited member pages was both the advertising and the product.

~ four owners in eleven years ~

Extra.hu was passed along the way small profitable-looking infrastructure usually is. It began under stop.hu, a Hungarian portal of the period. Jasmin Media Group acquired it around 2005. In 2008 DoclerWeb bought it, and that company's subsidiary DotRoll became the operator.

DoclerWeb is worth a footnote. It belongs to the same Hungarian group as Docler Holding, the company behind LiveJasmin, which makes extra.hu one of the few national free-hosting services to have ended its life as an asset of a webcam business. DotRoll, a conventional domain registrar and host, was the entity that actually had to decide what to do with a decade of abandoned personal pages and no revenue attached to them. It decided in January 2010.

~ what is left at the domain ~

The closing announcement was published at atalakul.az.extra.hu. The word means "it is being transformed", and the notice was served on a free extra.hu subdomain, which is the product writing its own death notice on its own stationery. The Hungarian technology site HUP carried it on 26 January 2010, under a headline saying that one of Hungary's oldest free hosting services was being absorbed into DotRoll's paid offering, and summarized the terms in five words: there is time to move until 31 March.

The archived captures track the decline cleanly. The homepage holds steady at about 6,900 bytes through 3 February 2010, then drops to 4,400 on 7 February when the notice replaces the signup flow. It stays at that size through early May. By 22 September 2010 it is down to 1,700 bytes, and on 9 October it is serving a redirect. That is the autumn in which the servers are said to have ceased, dated to the fortnight.

Today extra.hu redirects to dotroll.com with a tracking tag that reads utm_source=parkolooldal, Hungarian for "parking page", a server being honest about itself in a query string. DotRoll does still hand out an extra.hu subdomain, bundled free with any paid domain registration: 50 megabytes of static HTML, with no forum or blog engine allowed to run on it. The name survives as a courtesy attached to a purchase, which is a stranger fate than being switched off.

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