Pages Perso Orange

» see pagesperso-orange.fr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

France Télécom launched Wanadoo on 2 May 1996 as its consumer internet brand, and like most national telephone monopolies getting into the business that decade, it bundled a slab of free web space in with the dial-up account. You got an address under perso.wanadoo.fr, a few megabytes, and an FTP login. What you did with them was entirely your problem.

What people did with them was the ordinary miracle of that period. Genealogy projects running to hundreds of pages, club pages for a village football team written by the treasurer. A teacher's course notes, left up for twenty years after the teacher retired, with scanned model railway photographs on the page after. None of it was designed and all of it was specific.

The same arrangement existed in every country that had a phone company and a dial-up product, mine included, and it is where a great many people my age first typed a tag by hand. The French version is remarkable mainly for how long it lasted. GeoCities was closed in 2009 and Multimania had already been swallowed by Lycos years before that, while Pages Perso went on quietly serving pages written in 1998 to anyone who still had the URL.

The brand change in June 2006 is the only interesting thing that happened to it in two decades. Wanadoo became Orange across the whole France Télécom group, and the hosting followed, moving to pagesperso-orange.fr with the old wanadoo addresses redirecting. The sites themselves did not change at all. A page built for Netscape in 1999 was still being served in 2023 under a brand name that did not exist when it was written.

~ the record ~

~ the shutdown clock ~

Orange announced the end with a schedule rather than a date, which is the humane way to do it and also the way that guarantees most people miss every deadline. From 5 September 2023 no visitor could reach a Pages Perso site. Owners then had until 9 January 2024 to download their content and request that their address be forwarded to a new host. The forwarding itself was promised until 5 September 2024, and only for customers who stayed with Orange.

There was a commercial arrangement attached, as there usually is. Orange partnered with OVHcloud and offered departing users a hosting package at €22.96 for the first year with a free domain thrown in. A free service of twenty-seven years' standing was converted into a lead generation exercise on the way out.

~ the part that is always the same ~

The migration offer assumes the owner is alive and still an Orange customer. For a hosting service this old, a large share of the pages fail at least one of those two conditions. Somewhere in that directory was a genealogy site holding the only transcription anyone had made of forty years of parish registers, with a contact address on it that had stopped being read a decade before the notice went out.

Orange's own directory listed tens of thousands of sites, and the press coverage was blunt that the majority were abandoned. Abandoned is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It means nobody had edited them, not that nobody was reading them.

~ who caught the files ~

Archive Team went at it and found out why nobody had attempted it earlier. The service rate-limited hard, and it punished crawlers specifically for requesting pages that did not exist: too many 404s against a non-CDN domain and the connection was timed out for roughly twenty-four hours. ArchiveBot could not finish inside the window, so the job was moved to a distributed effort spread across many volunteer machines.

The deadline moved too. Archive Team's own notes record the 5 September date being extended by a month to 5 October 2023, which is the sort of amendment that never gets written up anywhere a researcher will find it. The grab completed in 2023 and sits on the Internet Archive under archiveteam_pagespersoorange. That collection is now the French personal web of 1996 to 2023, as much of it as a few hundred volunteers could pull through a rate limiter in time.

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