Jeeran

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

~ the obituary ~

Jeeran means neighbors. Omar Koudsi and Laith Zraikat started it in Amman in 2000, and the first version of the product was free web hosting: a page of your own, an ASP guestbook, a hit counter, in Arabic, at a moment when the amount of Arabic on the web was small enough that people wrote articles about how small it was.

That is a different founding story from most of the Arab web companies of the period, which were portals chasing advertising. Jeeran was infrastructure for people who wanted to publish and had nowhere to do it in their own script. In 2005 it added blogs, which was the same bet made again with better tools. In 2010 it turned into something else entirely, a reviews and local listings site for restaurants and businesses across Arab cities, and that is the version most people who know the name remember.

The reviews version worked. Zraikat, who left in 2012, describes taking the user base from a handful of friends to nearly seven million. Jeeran turned up on regional top ten lists of Middle Eastern websites around 2010, next to Maktoob and the other names that were being bought up by foreign portals around then. No acquirer came for Jeeran. It kept running on its own for another sixteen years.

~ the case file ~

~ what free hosting was for ~

An Arabic homepage host in 2000 was solving a problem the English speaking web had not noticed existed. Encoding was still unreliable, right to left layout broke half the tools people had, and the free hosts everyone else used assumed a Latin alphabet all the way down to the file names. Jeeran's early URLs are full of ASP endpoints named for guestbooks and post-it notes, the same furniture GeoCities gave people, rebuilt for a different direction of text.

~ the gap in the archive ~

The Wayback Machine has jeeran.com serving a full Arabic front page, around 27 kilobytes, every day through February 2026. The last one is 27 February. There are no captures in March. The next capture is 7 April 2026 and it is 2,276 bytes of Cloudflare Registrar parking page. Today the domain still resolves to Cloudflare and the TLS handshake fails, because there is no certificate behind it anymore.

So the death is a bracket rather than a date, and the bracket is a month wide. I found no press notice, no farewell post, no thread. A company that spent twenty six years putting Arabic on the web went off it without a sentence of coverage in any language, which is a quieter ending than almost anything else on this site, and Jeeran is far enough outside what I was reading that I would not have known either.

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