Freewebs / Webs.com

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

~ the obit ~

Freewebs was a place to make a website without knowing how a website worked. Two brothers, Haroon and Zeki Mokhtarzada, built it in 2001 during their last year at the University of Maryland, with a younger brother helping. it grew fast. by 2007 the site was pulling eighteen million visitors a month, most of them building a page by dragging boxes around instead of writing html.

my free-homepage memory is geocities, the one nearly everybody in turkey passed through when the web was still new. freewebs was the generation after that, the point-and-click version, and by the time it peaked I had already moved my energy into forum signatures on frmtr with my hardware list in them. I knew the freewebs.com subdomains from other people's links. I never made one myself.

In november 2008 freewebs renamed itself Webs, though the old freewebs.com addresses kept working for anyone who did not bother switching. On december 28 2011 Vistaprint, the online printing company, bought Webs for a hundred and seventeen and a half million dollars (close enough). for a while nothing changed. the free pages stayed up and the people who made them mostly forgot the company had an owner at all.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the actual end ~

in july 2023 Vistaprint announced that Webs was closing, saying it wanted to focus on printing and design and that demand for web hosting had fallen off. On august 31 2023 the last free subdomains went dark. the domains that people had paid for got moved to a host called ExactHosting, a name none of the original freewebs users would recognize.

~ the long tail ~

By 2023 a free drag-and-drop homepage was not a product anymore, it was a memory. wix and squarespace had taken the paying half of that idea and social networks had taken the rest, because a facebook profile was the free homepage that actually got visitors. freewebs outlived geocities by fourteen years and still ended the same way, a big pile of small personal pages switched off at once because the company holding them found something better to do. it sits next to [[geocities]] and [[tripod]] in the graveyard of places that gave people a corner of the web for nothing.

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