So-net U-Page+

» see so-net.ne.jp/option/upp/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

So-net is Sony's internet provider in Japan, and like every provider of its generation it gave subscribers somewhere to put a homepage. The first version was called U-Page. On 9 July 2002 So-net stopped taking signups for it, and the next day it opened U-Page+ in its place. That notice is still readable in the Wayback Machine on So-net's own page, with the terms laid out underneath it: 10MB of space at no charge, with more available in 5MB blocks up to 50MB at 100 yen a month per block. You also got to pick the name of your own home directory.

The old U-Page was given until the end of December 2002, after which the data on it would be deleted. Anyone who wanted to keep a page had six months to apply for the new service and move their files across, with a migration manual provided. That handover is also what fixes the launch date. U-Page+ is dated by the day U-Page stopped accepting customers, which So-net published at the time and never had reason to restate afterward.

Then it just ran. For eighteen and a half years, nothing about U-Page+ was news. Personal homepages went out of fashion in Japan the way they did everywhere, with blogs taking the writing and mobile taking the audience. A quiet layer of subscriber pages stayed up underneath all of that, because nobody at the ISP had a reason to turn it off.

~ the record ~

~ the notice ~

In September 2020 So-net published the end. U-Page+ would stop on Thursday 28 January 2021 at 15:00, and the announcement included a sentence that is rarer than it should be in this business: the company was not preparing a replacement service. Customers who wanted to keep publishing were told to look at So-net's rental server product, with the warning that the URLs would be different, or to go register a domain and find a host themselves.

Archive Team ran a grab against it before the deadline and the result is filed as saved, which for a hosting service of that age means tens of thousands of pages that had not been touched by their owners in a decade.

~ the shape of the thing ~

Free hosting with a paid upgrade path is territory I know well. I came online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem and spent the years after that on whatever host would take a page without asking for money, which in Turkey meant the global free hosts rather than anything my provider offered. U-Page+ is the other model, the one where the space arrives bundled with the dial-up account and your URL carries your ISP's name in it forever.

That model aged strangely. It made the page feel like part of the phone bill, which kept it alive long after the owner had stopped caring, and it meant the page died when the billing relationship did. Eighteen years is a long time for 10MB, and a 2021 shutdown date on a 2002 service tells you exactly how little it cost So-net to keep the lights on.

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