Hypermart

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

~ the goodbye ~

Free hosting was the first thing I understood about the web as something you could write to rather than only read. In 1998 I was on a 33.6k modem in Turkey and the arithmetic was simple: a server cost money in dollars and a page cost nothing, so everyone I knew who put something online put it somewhere that carried an advertisement for the privilege. Hypermart was in that category and also slightly beside it, because its pitch was aimed at businesses.

That was the unusual part. GeoCities and Angelfire were selling a homepage to a person. Hypermart offered ten megabytes with full CGI access and virtual hosting for a domain you already owned, and it described the customer as a small company. In 1997 that combination cost real money everywhere else. The copyright line on its own front page ran from 1996, which is the earliest date the site itself will admit to.

It belonged to Go2Net, a Seattle company that assembled a portfolio out of exactly this kind of property. Search was MetaCrawler and Dogpile. Silicon Investor carried the stock message boards, and Hypermart held up the part where a visitor published something of their own. The model was to own a lot of medium-sized destinations and sell advertising across all of them, which was a perfectly reasonable thing to believe in 1999.

~ the chronicle ~

~ ten megs and a banner ~

The bargain was written into the HTML. You uploaded a page and the host injected its own markup above yours, so what a visitor loaded was an advertisement followed by whatever you had made. Everybody who used free hosting in that decade spent time trying to get the banner out, and the hosts spent the same decade closing whatever hole you had found, which is a small arms race that ran quietly for years across every service in the category.

What separated Hypermart was CGI. A lot of free hosts refused to run scripts at all, because a script is how you turn a static page into something that can be abused, and a company giving away disk space to strangers has thin margins for abuse. Hypermart allowed it, which meant working guestbooks and hit counters, and it is why its users tended to be the more technical end of the free-hosting population.

~ the owners ~

InfoSpace announced the purchase of Go2Net in July 2000 at 4.2 billion dollars in stock and closed it that October, by which point the market those shares were priced against had already turned. The copyright line on Hypermart's pages changed to InfoSpace and stayed frozen at the year 2000 for a very long time afterward, which tells you roughly how much attention the property was getting.

The free tier went away in the years after that, converted to paid accounts, and the complaints from that period are still sitting in hosting forums where users describe being moved onto a bill they had not asked for. The brand kept moving. By its final decade the pages were being served under Web.com, which had accumulated Interland and HostPro and a long list of similar names, and Hypermart had become one entry on a list of brands the company owned. Nobody was working on it.

~ the day it stopped answering ~

The last capture of hypermart.net serving its own front page is 12 March 2023. The first redirect is 16 March. From then on the domain answers with a 301 to a Web.com page listing its brands, with hypermart passed as a query parameter, which is about as unceremonious as an ending gets. Twenty-seven years, and the closing statement is a URL argument.

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