Lycos Europe, which is liquidating the majority of the business after failing to find a buyer, is shutting down its Tripod free web hosting business – and is warning users to back up now or face losing their websites. The failed portal e-mailed users on Saturday to say it is terminating Tripod accounts from February 15, after which accounts will be deleted along with all pages stored on them…
“After this date it will be impossible to view your Homepage in the internet or to do a Backup using FTP from your page because the content will be unrecoverably deleted … We regret having to take this step and we want to thank you for your confidence in the past. Currently, we are still working on finding a solution to provide you the service through another provider. If we should succeed in doing so, we will inform you within the next 4 weeks. But as this is currently doubtful, we would like to ask you to assume the end of the service.”
Tripod was founded in 1992 and, along with GeoCities, was one of the first mass website creation services, monetised by premium services and ads. It’s likely Lycos will continue operating Tripod outside of Europe.
Update: Lycos Europe is also closing Lycos Mail and its US facing Jubii portal. Symptomatic of Lycos’ confused ownership structure, Lycos Inc (USA) launched the site as a play for American eyeballs under a different name from “Lycos”, because its license with Lycos Corp prevented it from being “Lycos” in America; crazy, and Lycos Europe was known to have invested heavily in the launch.
All of these closures were expected as Lycos Europe is liquidating itself everywhere but Denmark. But some reporting of the closures has forced Lycos Inc to issue a press release and write to all US Tripod users to clarify the services will remain online in the US, where they are operated by Lycos Inc, a separate company from Lycos Europe.