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Angelfire, I bet that's a name you haven't heard in years...
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Back when personal web sites were all the rage, and you needed to be slightly competent to navigate the internet, there were dozens of (mostly free) services available that let you host a web page. Besides Angelfire, there was Geocities, Tripod, FortuneCity, Xoom, and many more.
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It shouldn't surprise you that most of these services are dead. Geocities went down in 2009 (unless you lived in Japan, where it lived on until 2019), Tripod suffered the same fate as Angelfire (another story for another day), and almost every other service ended up dissolving or merging with a bigger company. Angelfire is one of the few classic web hosts that still remain.
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It also sucks.
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The fact that Angelfire (and Tripod to an extent) is still around is shocking to me. You'd think that the service would be discontinued by now. I guess it must be cheap for Lycos to keep the servers running, considering that most of Angelfire's sites have extremely small file sizes, are abandoned, and haven't been updated in centuries.
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But why does it suck? Because it's outclassed by every other web hosting service on the internet. It has nothing other web hosting services don't do better.
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To start, Angelfire doesn't even have a free plan (which is probably why it's dead now). You have to pay a monthly fee to use it, which is ironic considering the reason most people even use these type of web hosting services is because they can't pay for web hosting themselves. There are 3 plans on Angelfire, Entry, Basic, and THE Plan (yes, the capitalised "THE" is a part of the name). Each of these cost $1.05, $3.25, and $10.95 monthly respectively. In contrast, Neocities does offer a free plan, and the optional paid plan is only $3 monthly.
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For the price, the amount of space Angelfire gives you is pitiful. The free plan would've given you 20 MB of storage, Entry gives you 40 MB, Basic gets you 100 MB, and THE Plan gives you an incredible 5 GB. On the other hand, Neocities gives you 1 GB free and 50 GB if you pay. They literally want you to pay more and get less.
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Also, Angelfire's developers aren't active and the community is basically nonexistant. The developers haven't posted an update on their social media or blog since 2012. Angelfire's "community blog" hasn't had a new topic posted on it since 2012, and every topic in the blog has been overrun by bots in the comments. Kyle Drake, Neocities' owner, is active online, and Neocities' community is alive and thriving.
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To break it all down...
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Free
Paid plan is $3 monthly
1GB of storage free
50GB of storage in paid plan
Active developer
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No free plan (no longer available)
$1.05, $3.25, and $10.95 monthly for each plan
20 MB of storage in (unavailable) free plan
40 MB, 100MB, and 5 GB of storage for each plan
Inactive development team
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For all the flak I've given Angelfire, I'm actually quite glad they're still around. Being a dead service, it has essentially remained as a time capsule to the 2000's internet. Their classic members directory is a fun read. Sometimes I wonder where these people are now. Are they even alive anymore? How have their lives changed since they created their Angelfire pages? Questions we may never get answers to, since there's little chance you'll ever track these users down.
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