VilaBOL

» see vilabol.uol.com.br as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the free homepage did not die everywhere on the same day. yahoo switched geocities off in 2009 and the english-speaking internet treated that as the end of the era, which for the english-speaking internet it was. brazil kept going for another three years.

vilabol was the hosting arm of BOL, brasil online, which launched on 25 april 1996 under grupo abril and was folded into uol a few months later. BOL's whole proposition was free access, and around it grew a free mailbox with a free place to put a page next to it. the hosting service itself has no recorded start date in any source i can find, which is its own small comment on how carefully anybody documented the thing while it was the biggest free host in the country.

what it gave you was fifteen megabytes under a vilabol.uol.com.br address. there was a builder if you did not want to type html by hand, and a hit counter sitting at the bottom of the page either way. that was the standard kit of the period and it was enough. a whole generation of brazilians learned what a file path was because they had to upload one.

i was not in any of this. my free-host years happened in english on geocities, and portuguese was a wall i had no reason to climb. but the shape is identical everywhere it happened, right down to the counter. every country ran one of these and every one of them filled up with the same material, fan pages and lists of favorite songs, typed by people who had just worked out that they could publish.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what fifteen megabytes bought ~

fifteen megabytes reads like an insult now and it was a genuine constraint then, in the useful way. video was out of the question. photographs had to be shrunk before they went up. the limit forced people to learn something real about file sizes, and it kept pages small enough to load over a dial-up line, which is what almost everyone in the country was on.

the address was the other half of it. vilabol.uol.com.br/yourname was not a domain you owned and anybody reading it could tell it was a free page. that was not embarrassing yet. having any address at all still put you well ahead of most of the people you knew.

~ the day it went off ~

the warning went out in may 2012, saying the hosting service would be deactivated in the coming weeks. new sites had already stopped being accepted before that. by august the notice on the site carried a hard date, 17 september 2012, and told people to back up their files immediately. underneath it uol pointed users at xpg, the other free host it had acquired and decided to keep, or at paid hosting with a domain for r$12.90 a month.

the reason was consolidation rather than cost. uol owned two free hosts and had no use for the older one, so the older one went. what died with it was a decade and a half of brazilian personal pages, much of it never picked up by an archiving project, because the volunteer rescue that descended on geocities in 2009 had no counterpart in portuguese.

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