Sweb.cz

» see sweb.cz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Seznam.cz got there before Google did and stayed. It was founded in 1996, it is still the search engine a large share of Czechs use by default, and somewhere in the national portal it bolted on the thing every national portal of that era bolted on: free space where anyone could put up a page. Sweb.cz was that space, and it ran from 2000 until the end of November 2022.

The earliest copy anybody has of it is from 9 November 2000, offering 20 megabytes and an address in the form sweb.cz slash your username. Later the usernames moved in front, so your page lived at yourname.sweb.cz, and both forms kept working to the end. By the final years the free tier was 100 megabytes with PHP, FTP access, a browser file manager and visitor statistics. Sixty crowns a month got you two gigabytes with a MySQL database, and took the ads off.

The Czech tech press called it legendary when it closed, which is a word journalists reach for about free hosting more or less automatically, but in this case the inventory backed it up. When Archive Team went to copy the service in November 2022 they assembled roughly three million URLs across 144,000 separate domains. That is twenty-two years of somebody's band page and somebody's model railway.

~ the case file ~

~ what 100 MB bought ~

A hundred megabytes sounds like a rounding error now, and the storage was always the least of it. What a free host actually sold you in 2000 was an FTP password, which is to say a place that would accept a file and then serve it to strangers. Everything downstream of that was yours to figure out, badly, in a text editor.

PHP support is the part that separates Sweb from the Geocities generation. A Geocities page was static and stayed static. Sweb let the amateur run code on a server, which means an awful lot of first guestbooks and first login forms in the Czech Republic were written against it by people who had no business writing a login form.

~ the same room in a different language ~

I never had a Czech page and I cannot read the ones that were on there. But this is the one category on the list where I know exactly what the inside of it looked like, because Turkey had the same arrangement at the same time and so did everywhere else. You got the space from your ISP or from whatever portal your country used instead of Yahoo, you uploaded over FTP on a connection that made a 400 kilobyte image a decision, and the result was ugly and yours. Sweb.cz is that, in Czech, for twenty-two years.

~ the archive the owner refused to make ~

Seznam announced the closure on its company blog on 13 October 2022, gave users until the end of November, and offered a 51 percent discount on paid hosting from Webglobe for anyone who wanted to move. The post was blunt about what happened otherwise: the site would stop displaying to visitors and its content would be permanently deleted. Seznam stated that it would not be backing up or archiving any of it.

Two archives disagreed. Archive Team had already run a subdomain sweep in July 2021 and came back in November 2022 with lists pulled out of Bing and out of Seznam's own directory of hosted pages, feeding them through ArchiveBot in batches over several weeks. The Czech National Library's Webarchiv built a dedicated Sweb.cz thematic collection. Neither of them needed the operator's permission, which is the entire argument for web archiving compressed into one shutdown.

The service stayed reachable for about a week into December past its own deadline, and by 13 December 2022 every subdomain was redirecting to the bare sweb.cz address. Today sweb.cz redirects to the Seznam home page, so the parent company is still prosperous and still sitting on the URL where 144,000 pages used to be.

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