Yandex Narod

» see narod.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Narod.ru opened in 2000. Yandex, then a four-year-old search company and not yet the thing it became, gave away hosting: you picked a name, you got name.narod.ru, and you put a website on it for nothing. There was a page builder for people who did not want to write HTML and a raw upload path for people who did. There was also a file locker attached, up to five gigabytes, which is how most Russians who used Narod actually used Narod.

The word narod means the people, and the naming was not accidental. This was the Russian answer to the same question Geocities answered in the United States and Tripod answered a little differently: where does an individual person put a page in a decade when hosting costs money and nobody has a credit card set up for it. By December 2010 Yandex was claiming more than three million sites on the service.

My own version of that decade ran through a different set of free hosts, in a different alphabet, and I would not pretend to have opened a narod.ru page. What is worth saying from the outside is that the shape was identical everywhere. A search company or a portal gave away a subdomain and a few megabytes of space, and for about ten years that was the entire on-ramp to publishing anything for anyone who was not a business. Russia's version happened to be operated by the company that also ran the search engine indexing it.

~ the dossier ~

~ three million home pages ~

The number is the interesting part. Three million is not a niche and it is not a rounding error inside Yandex; it is a substantial fraction of the Russian-language web as it existed for personal publishing. Fan pages and regional hobby clubs, software archives kept by one person, text files somebody wanted preserved somewhere other than a hard drive. The typical Narod site was small and ugly, and it was usually the only copy of what was on it.

It also had a second life as a file host. Before cloud storage was a consumer product, narod.ru was where a Russian-speaking forum posted the thing it wanted you to download, which meant the service carried a lot of traffic that had nothing to do with home pages and everything to do with people passing files around.

~ what yandex said in january ~

The dismantling happened in two moves, seventeen days apart. On 17 January 2013 Yandex closed the five gigabyte file exchange and moved the function into Yandex.Disk, its new consumer cloud drive. On 31 January it announced that the hosting itself was going to uCoz, a site-builder company, and the stated reason was that the service had become less popular.

The migration ran through April. Sites made in the simpler editor moved on 8 April and sites made in the more elaborate one on 25 April. After that Yandex was out of the free hosting business. uCoz took the narod.ru domain along with the users, so nobody's address broke on the day, which is a gentler ending than Geocities got and worth saying out loud. What changed in April 2013 was who answered for the sites, not where they lived.

~ what is on the domain now ~

Type narod.ru into a browser in 2026 and something loads. It is a Russian ratings site for online services, unrelated to any of this, sitting on an address that once meant free hosting to a whole country.

The subdomains went somewhere else again. Ask for any name under narod.ru today and a server answers, but what comes back is a stock 404 page written in German, served by a hosting provider with no connection to Yandex or to uCoz. The wildcard is still pointed at a machine. The thing the wildcard was for has been gone long enough that the error message is in the wrong language.

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