ProHosting

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

~ the obit ~

ProHosting Corporation was founded in 1995 with its principal office in Provo, Utah. Its own About page in 2002 claimed "well over 700,000 hosted Web sites" and described a business that sold domain registration and dial-up access alongside the hosting itself. By the end of the decade the banner across the top of its free tier carried a bigger number: over 2,122,500 sites since 1996. That figure is the only public measurement the company ever gave of itself, and nobody audited it.

The free tier was the part that mattered to anyone who was not paying. Free ProHosting gave you 100 MB of space and 1.2 GB of monthly transfer, which in 2001 was more than enough for a page with a photo album and a guestbook on it. Your address came out as your username, then the name of the machine you had landed on, then prohosting.com. Twenty-two machines carried the free accounts and somebody had given each of them a name, so your URL ran through odin or thor until the Norse gods ran out and the weather took over with rain, snow, lightning and thunder.

That arrangement puts a host's infrastructure into the URL of a teenager's anime gallery, which is a thing almost no modern platform would allow. It also made Free ProHosting difficult to archive later, because there is no single directory listing to walk. Archive Team eventually worked out that the three forms of the address were interchangeable and wrote the trick down on its wiki, which is where most of what is left of the service now lives.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the free floor closes ~

In November 2010 the front page of free.prohosting.com changed. Under the header, in red, it said PROHOSTING OFFERS YOU MORE, and under that, in bold: "Free Prohosting will be discontinuing our free hosting service at the end of the year." Then a sign-up button for the paid plans. The copyright line at the foot still read 2010. The service went off on 1 January 2011, and a farewell image went up that Archive Team saved and filed under the name Bye.

The clean way to find what was lost is a search Archive Team recorded at the time: the phrase "This website will go offline on January 1st." restricted to prohosting.com, which returned the tier's own eviction notice reproduced across every member page Google still had indexed. The same wiki note points at Wikipedia's LinkSearch for prohosting.com, because even an encyclopedia had citations pointing into the free floor.

~ thirty years, then a handover ~

The paid company carried on for fifteen more years with a site that barely changed. Then on 29 April 2026 a notice appeared at the top of prohosting.com headed "Major Accouncement for all ProHosting Customers", typo included. It said that after thirty years of serving the website and email hosting needs of customers around the world, the owners had decided to exit the hosting business, and that rather than close up shop and leave people without hosting, they had come to an arrangement with a brand new company called PWHosts to take on all existing accounts.

The schedule was short. PWHosts took over billing on 1 May. The agreement between the two companies required every service to be migrated by 1 July 2026, and on that date ProHosting ceased all operations and switched off its hosting and DNS. The site still answers today with a page that thanks customers for the last thirty years and points at a set of PWHosts URLs for the new control panel and the new webmail. The copyright line still says ProHosting Corporation.

~ an address you could paste into a signature ~

Free hosting was how you got a page at all in Turkey around 2000, and I was on TTNet at home by then with a 56k modem that had started life as a 14.4k. The point of a page was not really the page. It was having an address you could paste into a forum signature, and I spent more time on frmtr building signatures with my hardware list in them than I ever spent on the sites those signatures pointed at.

I cannot honestly tell you whether anything of mine ever sat on a machine called thunder. There were a dozen hosts in that class and everybody treated them as interchangeable. That is why so little of what they held got saved when the free floors started closing one by one.

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