Server.com

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

~ the obituary ~

Server.com's best years line up almost exactly with my first years online and it still never reached me. From 1997 to 2001 it was one of the busiest addresses on the web, and on a dial-up account in Turkey it was invisible. That is ordinary for the period. The English-language web had a whole tier of tooling for people who ran their own sites, and everyone else used whatever the free host happened to bundle.

What it offered, though offered is a better word than sold because most of it was free, was a working piece of your website that you did not have to write. A message board, or a form that mailed you the answers people typed into it.

Sean Brunnock built the first one in Boston in 1996, a personal information manager that lived on the web instead of on a desktop, and announced it on Usenet that October. He called the category webapps. The word outlived every product he put under it.

~ the case file ~

~ what a webapp meant in 1997 ~

The 1997 additions are the ones with a real claim on being first. A threaded message board service you could bolt onto any page, and a web-based mailing list manager to go with it. The online calendar and the form builder came in the same stretch and were among the earliest of either. All of it ran on Perl, later Perl and PHP against MySQL on Linux.

That was the shape of the web then. Your page lived on a free host or on your ISP's personal space and it was static HTML. Anything on it that actually did something came off somebody else's server with their name on it. Server.com was that somebody for a very large number of pages, which is how it ended up on Yahoo! Internet Life's useful-sites list in 1997 and in net magazine's hundred sites that changed the web in August 2002.

~ the snap detour ~

By early 2000 the whole service was running as server.snap.com. NBC had bought Snap and Xoom to assemble a portal, and a portal needs applications behind it. Server.com went in as that layer. NBCi collapsed in April 2001 and the webapps went back to their own domain, which is the unusual direction of travel for that era.

The year after the detour was the peak. 100 million pageviews a month in 2001, and Media Life counted it among the twenty biggest advertising domains on the web. In 2002 it shipped one of the first web-based RSS readers, before RSS readers were a thing anyone shopped for by name.

~ what is left ~

The founder's own account of the ending is the useful part. Nobody searched for a suite of webapps. Each piece was beaten by something that did one job and could be found by the name of that job. The suite logic came from the desktop, where Microsoft had won by bundling, and it did not carry over to a web where people arrived through a search box with one word in it.

In 2007 everything moved to YourWebApps.com and Server.com stopped being a product. The domain sold in 2009 for 770,000 dollars. Brunnock's own page says YourWebApps shut down in 2019, and yet the address still answers in 2026, serving a single message board for fans of the band Silver Jews. That is the honest shape of hosted services: the platform becomes a memory and one community that never left is still posting into it.

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