Olympe

» see olympe.in as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Free web hosting almost always has a catch, and in the 2000s the catch was a banner. Someone else's advertisement sat at the top of your page, or in a floating frame you could not kill, and that was the deal: you got the megabytes, they got the impressions. Olympe refused that deal for nine years. A French nonprofit association handed out hosting with PHP and databases to anyone who asked, in five languages, and sold nothing on top of it. By 2016 it had passed ninety thousand users and over seventy thousand hosted sites.

The association had been set up around the digital divide and freedom of expression, and the free host was the first thing it built. Being an actual association mattered, because it meant the hosting ran on a patron rather than on revenue. A sponsor paid the bills and the users never saw the arrangement at all. For most of a decade nobody had any reason to ask who was covering the servers.

At the end of 2015 the patron was acquired, and the acquiring company had no interest in continuing to fund a French free-hosting charity. By early 2016 the association was publicly in trouble. It put a campaign on Indiegogo asking for forty thousand euros, enough it said to guarantee three years of stability while a sustainable model was worked out, and Framasoft and LinuxFr both ran appeals for it in April. The position was stated without any softening: either the campaign succeeds or the doors close for good.

The campaign raised close to twelve thousand euros. On 4 June 2016 the Twitter account posted four words of French that amounted to "closing tonight, more information to come." On 6 June olympe.in stopped resolving, with no notice left on the front page and nothing further on Twitter.

~ the record ~

~ the money ~

The farewell letter is worth reading because it explains itself properly, which operators almost never do. It names the cause in the second paragraph: the purchase at the end of 2015 of the association's principal patron by a company unwilling to keep funding Olympe. It thanks the contributors who put up the twelve thousand euros. It tells users to back up their sites and databases quickly and move to another host. And it ends on a line about turning a page without closing the book, written by people who already knew the association was about to vanish entirely.

~ the last week ~

The gap between the long notice and the end was days, not months. The detailed closure page was on the site by 5 June saying services would stop "in the coming days" and promising to announce the exact date on Twitter. The Twitter post on 4 June said tonight. Both of those are in the record and they contradict each other, which is what a volunteer organization running out of runway looks like from outside. The formal notice and the real deadline arrived in the wrong order because nobody had time left to keep them in step.

~ the rescue ~

Archive Team went in and the numbers are the clearest measure of what a free host actually is. They discovered 4,229 sites on the platform and saved 1,523 of them, which is 36 percent, totaling three gigabytes. Three gigabytes for a decade of seventy thousand sites tells you these were small pages by people who were not professionals, which is the whole point of the thing.

The other number in that pair is the gap. Olympe's own figure was more than seventy thousand sites and the crawl found four thousand, because the rest had no inbound links anybody knew about. Most of a free host is pages that nothing on the internet points at, and a crawler can only follow links.

~ why this one lands ~

I came online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem in Turkey, and free hosting was the entire ladder. You got an account somewhere, you learned what an index file was, you discovered that your host had put an advertising frame around your work without asking, and you looked for a better one. Everybody I knew in the forum years went through some version of that, usually several times, usually on hosts that disappeared without a letter. Olympe is the version where somebody built the ad-free one on purpose and kept it alive for nine years on a patron's goodwill, then wrote to everybody when the goodwill got sold.

olympe.in now serves an Indian government-jobs listing site. The domain was worth more than the association ever was.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »