FC2WEB

» see fc2web.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Free hosting is one of the few categories on this site I lived inside rather than read about. In the dial-up years a page meant finding somebody who would give you a subdomain and an FTP login for nothing, and then you uploaded hand-written HTML over 33.6k and waited to see whether the images came through. FC2WEB was exactly that deal, run in Japanese for a Japanese audience, which is the only reason it was never mine.

FC2 was founded on 20 July 1999 and is, on paper, a US corporation headquartered in Las Vegas, while almost everything it has ever published was read in Japan. The free homepage space launched in 2001 and spent the next two decades as basic infrastructure for Japanese personal sites. The address was the whole product: your own name sitting in front of fc2web.com, and whatever you uploaded behind it stayed put.

On 14 April 2025 FC2 announced that it would close. The reason given was unusually direct for a corporate notice. Over twenty years and more, the systems and servers had deteriorated to the point where maintenance was difficult, so the company was consolidating onto FC2 Homepage, the newer free hosting product it still develops. Several other legacy services, among them FC2 Chat and FC2 Diary, went out in the same sweep.

The service ended on 30 June 2025, along with support for it. Twenty four years.

~ the dossier ~

~ the address was the product ~

Migrating to FC2 Homepage preserved the files and destroyed the URL, because the successor hands out different addresses. Every Japanese guide written during those eleven weeks makes the same practical point: if fc2web.com appears on your business cards or your flyers, start reprinting now.

The best illustration of who was still there in 2025 is a notice the Japan Esperanto Institute published in May of that year, addressed to its members who kept pages on FC2WEB and explaining what they needed to do before the end of June. The notice is dated May 2025, twenty four years after the hosting they were being moved off first opened.

~ the notice it still serves ~

www.fc2web.com answers today. What it returns is a tidy memorial page under the heading サービス終了のお知らせ, which is simply an announcement that the service has ended, dated 30 June 2025 and signed off with a 2025 copyright line. It explains that support ended on the same date and that inquiries after that point will not be answered, then points you at the successor.

Japanese free web services had a bad year in 2025. goo blog announced its own closure for 18 November in the same season, and the Japanese press covered the two together under the general heading of web services vanishing. A country that put an enormous amount of its early personal web onto free portal hosting is now watching the hosting age out from underneath it.

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