Tripod.com

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

~ the obit ~

i remember tripod from the same dial-up window as angelfire and geocities. when you were learning to put a personal page on the web in 1999 or 2000 in turkey on a 33.6k modem, these were the three names that showed up on every "how to make a homepage" article. i used geocities for my own first attempts, but tripod was the one some friend from a forum was on. the urls looked the same shape, members.tripod.com slash some-handle, a counter at the bottom, a banner across the top, a midi file that played on load if the page owner had the energy to set one up.

tripod was started in 1992 by bo peabody and dick sabot at williams college, brett hershey was the third founder on the original team. the consumer free-hosting product launched in 1995 as part of a broader pivot into a youth-focused web portal. the company sold to lycos in february 1998 for fifty-eight million dollars. lycos already had angelfire from a separate acquisition in 1998, so the company spent most of its post-acquisition life running the two free-hosting brands in parallel without merging them.

the user count climbed through the late dot-com years on the back of the same dynamic that lifted geocities. peak was around six million registered pages by 2001, with a couple hundred thousand new sites a month. the product offered twenty megabytes of storage with cgi scripts, a built-in site builder called trellix, plus the option to keep your homepage at members.tripod.com forever as long as you let the banner run at the top. for a stretch of the late 90s and early 2000s the gap between tripod and geocities was small enough that which one you ended up on was usually a function of which signup form loaded faster on your modem.

tripod outlived geocities by almost seventeen years. yahoo killed geocities in october 2009, lycos kept tripod and angelfire running on quiet legacy infrastructure for another decade and a half. there were no new features, the site builder was frozen at the 2008 version, the banner ad slot rotated through a smaller and smaller pool of advertisers. lycos posted a shutdown notice on march 6 2026 and pulled the service on april 24 2026, ending a thirty-one year run. angelfire shut on the same date.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was for ~

tripod was a free homepage host that competed with geocities and angelfire for the same audience of late-90s users who wanted a page on the web but did not want to pay for hosting or register a domain. the trade was the standard one for the era: free hosting in exchange for a banner ad at the top of every page, with a paid tier that removed the banner. you got an html editor in the browser with a file uploader for images, plus a permanent url under members.tripod.com.

the trellix site builder, added after lycos bought the trellix software in 2000, was the differentiator from angelfire's simpler form-based editor. trellix offered a templated drag-and-place interface that was a step toward what later became squarespace and wix. it was also the reason a lot of small-business homepages ended up on tripod through the early 2000s, since the templates were closer to a professional layout than what you could put together by hand on geocities.

~ the long quiet ~

the part of the tripod story that nobody really tracked was the seventeen years between the geocities shutdown in october 2009 and the lycos shutdown in april 2026. lycos itself changed hands several times in that window, from terra to daum to ybrant and finally to the current owners, and tripod stayed online through all of it as a legacy product nobody invested in and nobody bothered to kill. the pages that had been built between 1996 and 2006 mostly stayed up, the link rot was severe but a non-trivial fraction of the archive was still resolving on its original urls in early 2026.

the shutdown announcement on march 6 2026 came with thirty days of notice. there was no migration tool and no successor product. the april 24 closing wiped the active site contents from the live web, although the wayback machine had been crawling tripod hosts since the late 90s and most of the high-traffic pages had been captured at least once. for the small-business pages and the long-tail personal homepages that nobody had ever bothered to archive, the april date was the end of the line.

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