Petit Homepage Service

» see petit.cc as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 2002 a shop opened in Moto-Asakusa, in the Taito ward of Tokyo, and its own about page described it as a small electric transmission store in Asakusa. There were exactly three people in it, and the page listed ages next to jobs: Suzuki Norihisa was twenty-seven and wrote the program, Mori Yuji was thirty and did the design. Hirose Yoshiyuki, the oldest at thirty-three, ran the operation. The shop was called Petit Denso. What it transmitted was homepages.

The product was Petit Homepage Service. You built the site inside the browser, with no FTP client and nothing to install, chose a word, and got that word twice over: the address at one end and a mailbox at the other. It was never free. The plan drafted in 2002 came to around five hundred yen a month, and by the time anyone outside the shop was looking it had settled at eight hundred.

GMO bought it on 9 May 2005. Two days later it was running as a paperboy&co. service, and on 19 July the price was cut to five hundred yen plus tax. It had come in by purchase rather than from the founders: paperboy's own company history puts its first product, the Lolipop rental server, in November 2001, and Petit was roughly the tenth thing to carry the name. Under that ownership it ran another fourteen and a half years and switched off at three in the afternoon on 31 January 2020.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ a homepage made of paper and cloth ~

The late pitch was literal about its own materials. Build a homepage out of paper and cloth, it said, and the templates shipped backgrounds that looked like both. The 2005 press release named the audience the service had actually found, which was people who made things and people who photographed them, and then added a line about being well thought of among mothers with young children.

That audience is also the honest distance here. A paid, browser-only, Japanese-language site builder pitched at hobbyists and at women with small kids had no route to a dial-up house in Ankara, and was not looking for one.

~ the only number it ever published ~

Petit never released a member count or a page-view total. What exists instead is a directory. Petit Mate Paradise was opt-in, so being in it was a decision rather than a default, and on 1 May 2012 it carried 1,650 sites across ten categories. Life led with 407 and handmade came second at 294.

That is a floor and not a size. Every site whose owner never ticked the box is missing from it, and seventeen years of a paid service leaves no other figure to work from.

~ a year of notice ~

The closing notice went up on 31 January 2019, a full calendar year before the end, which is a long runway for a Japanese consumer service. The year got used. Anyone who had paid past the end date was refunded, data could be exported on request through the contact form, and the migration offers were split by what people had actually been doing with the thing.

Diary users were pointed at Lolipop with WordPress on top, shop users at Color Me Shop. Anyone still inside a trial got the generic service page. Nowhere in any of it was a reason given, and petit.cc does not resolve today.

~ the sign-off ~

The last post on the service's news blog is not a farewell. It went up on 26 December 2019, five weeks before the end, and it is a notice about support desk hours over the new year holiday.

It opens the way that desk had always opened: hello, this is Petit Denso. Fifteen years after GMO bought the service, after the price had changed and the owner had changed its own name, the people answering the mail were still signing as the shop in Asakusa.

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