@homepage

» see homepage2.nifty.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

@homepage was not a product you could buy. It came with the line. If you paid Nifty for internet access from 1999 onward, part of what you were paying for was a folder on a web server carrying your account name, and a few hundred thousand people in Japan used it to make a page. The peak was 2003, with roughly 340,000 accounts holding a site.

Then the writing moved. Blogs took the diary, social networks took the links to your friends, and what stayed behind on @homepage was the kind of page that had been finished rather than abandoned, a shop's opening hours or a fan page for a drama that ended in 2004. Nobody deletes a finished page. They just stop opening the editor, and the hosting bill is already inside a bill they are paying for something else.

On 13 January 2016 Nifty announced that @homepage would close and that everything would be consolidated onto @niftyホームページサービス, with a free migration-only plan for existing users so that moving would cost nothing. It gave people until 15:00 on 29 September. In the end it took the pages down at 15:00 on 10 November, and about 120,000 of them stopped answering at the same minute.

~ the record ~

~ forty-two more days ~

The extension is the part worth keeping. On 26 September, three days before the original deadline, Nifty announced it was moving the date back by 42 days. The reason it published was a number: eight months after the shutdown announcement, of the just under 170,000 homepages still on the service, only about 15 percent had completed the move.

Fifteen percent of just under 170,000 is around 25,000 pages moved in eight months, leaving some 145,000 still sitting there. The extra six weeks shifted roughly the same number again, and 120,000 were still on the server when the switch was thrown. Nifty then changed the plan a second time. Data had originally been scheduled for deletion at shutdown; instead the files were kept until 12 December so that anyone who discovered the closure by finding their own site gone could still back it up or migrate. From 13 December neither was possible.

~ the eighty percent ~

An Impress report at the end of August put the abandonment rate plainly: over 80 percent of the remaining pages had been left untouched. Nifty's own explanation for why the migration numbers were so bad was that most of what was left had stopped being updated long ago, which meant the owner was not reading announcements about it either.

This is the quiet failure mode of hosting bundled into a subscription, and it is not negligence on anybody's part. The free homepage was free because it was invisible, and it stayed invisible right up to the moment Nifty needed the owner's attention. ISPs in Turkey bundled personal web space on much the same terms in those years, and whatever happened to that space is not something I ever found out. The blank is the argument, not an aside. You do not notice bundled hosting disappearing, because you never noticed having it.

~ the one that moved ~

Nifty did leave an exit sign. Migrating to the successor let you set a forwarding notice at the old @homepage URL, scheduled to keep displaying until 15:00 on 29 March 2018, so a page that moved in time got eighteen months of pointing at its own new address.

One of them is famous. 阿部寛のホームページ, the actor Hiroshi Abe's official page, is a Japanese internet landmark for being the fastest-loading site anyone can name, a few kilobytes of frames and plain links that have never been redesigned. It lived on @homepage until October 2016, when it moved without the design changing by a pixel. In 2026 every numbered homepage host at nifty.com fails to resolve, and abehiroshi.la.coocan.jp still answers in 538 bytes.

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