The Way Things Were: Overpriced Web Host

BoingBoing linked to this webpage, 1c4.net, advertising a 1995 web-hosting service. Back then you could apparently get a website hosted for the bargain price of $250 a month. That may seem a lot, but when you figure that you got a whopping 3mb of storage space with that, it suddenly seems more reasonable. Times sure have changed, but actually I don't think that this overpriced web host was ever real. First of all, did they have .net suffixes in 1995? Maybe they did, but I don't remember that. Second, the webpage 1c4.net was itself only created in 2003, according to its registration info. Finally, I just don't remember web hosts ever being that expensive, though in 1995 I was enjoying free web hosting via my university, so I wouldn't be in a position to know. But I'd assume that this ad is a joke of fairly recent vintage.

Technology

Posted on Mon Apr 19, 2004


Comments

.net has been around since the beginning, along with .org and .com
Posted by Scott  on  Mon Apr 19, 2004  at  12:19 PM
Just last year we found that our Church was still paying $120/mo for Web hosting. So $250/mo is not all that far out of band.

And as Scott posted, .net has been there since the beginning of the net - it was intended for 'network' businesses, like webhosting companies, not suprisingly...

Posted by Craig  on  Mon Apr 19, 2004  at  01:14 PM
I guess I was wrong about the age of .net. But there's still the fact that the registration info shows that the website 1C4.NET doesn't date back to 1995. It was only created on 21 Sep, 2003:

Domain Name: 1C4.NET
Created on: 21-Sep-03
Expires on: 21-Sep-05
Last Updated on: 02-Jan-04

Plus, with all the misspellings and exclamation marks, it's got to be satire.
Posted by The Curator  in  San Diego  on  Mon Apr 19, 2004  at  01:29 PM
Did some digging around and found that there are some old pages (or something) at the site:

http://1c4.net/t/
http://1c4.net/0/
http://1c4.net/f/
http://1c4.net/m/

etc.
Posted by Marcus  on  Tue Apr 20, 2004  at  05:06 PM
As well, I have noticed that is a domain name lapses and is re-registered (even by the first people who had it) the date of first creation sometimes changes. Has anyone emailed .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)?
Posted by Marcus  on  Tue Apr 20, 2004  at  05:09 PM
I was going to email the administrative contact listed on the registration info page, but when I rechecked, it looks like they've pulled the contact info and replaced it with anonymous info using the 'domain by proxy' service. I swear that when I first checked the registration a day or two ago, it was listed as being registered to someone up in Canada (Vancouver?), but now all that info is gone. Evidently they want to remain anonymous, for whatever reason.
Posted by The Curator  in  San Diego  on  Tue Apr 20, 2004  at  06:39 PM
Angelfire and Geocities were both giving away webspace in '95 for free. I believe my first angelfire site was allowed 3 or 4 megs, though it's been a long time, I could be wrong.
Posted by chla  on  Sat Apr 24, 2004  at  03:52 PM
how can they offer these services when they don't offer a way of contacting them to begin service? after some quick looking, i found a page with numerous links to http://www.well.com , any affiliation?
Posted by Alexa  on  Sun Apr 25, 2004  at  01:26 PM
It's entirely possible that this was a legit ad. ThunderBBS was around back in '95, as can be seen at this page: http://www.fidonet-on-the-internet.org/n1995/nodediff.209.

I spent a lot of time on Gopher back then, as my dial-up account for college and grad school was into a VAX mainframe running VMS, and everything on the system was text-based. Wow, that's been a long time. I don't even know if Gopher exists outside UMinn anymore.
Posted by Lou Minati  on  Sun May 09, 2004  at  12:46 AM
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