angelfire and tripod, gone

This is on the front of Lycos today:

To our users of Angelfire and Tripod. We apologize for the service interruptions. Unfortunately we will be shutting down in the next 30 days. Please move your hosting to another host as soon as possible.

...and probably won't be there next week since Angelfire and Tripod will be closed down on April 5, 2026. Or at least that's what the internet tells me.

It's funny how I found out about this.

I was looking up email providers just to see if any of the really old stuff was still in operation. Excite Mail still exists, but only as another Gmail since the Excite-run version was closed down August 31, 2021. This does make me wonder if you can actually sign up a Gmail account and have it end in @excite.com. Probably not, but it would be cool if you could.

Lycos still does offer free email addresses. I wouldn't get one because the service could get shut off at any moment. But when I went to the Lycos site, there was this huge notice that Angelfire and Tripod were shutting down.

What the hell are Angelfire and Tripod? Free web hosting services from forever ago, as in late '90s forever ago. These were places where you'd sign up and make some web pages.

I did use both Angelfire and Tripod in that forever ago era, but quickly dumped them once I got my own web site.

The Angelfire/Tripod closure is happening pretty much the exact same way AOL Hometown and Geocities closed. A small notice given, no easy option presented to back up your stuff at all, and then BUH-BYE, deleted...

...which is the way of things on the internet. Take this as a warning that if there's anything you care about at all that you posted online, download a copy right frickin' now. Get some USB sticks and download everything. In fact, make two copies on two separate sticks just in case one of the sticks bugs out on you. All your photos, all your videos, all your journal posts if you made any of those, all your social media posts, all your contact lists, all calendar schedules, all documents, all spreadsheets, whatever. Download EVERYTHING.

If you don't do it, you will lose it.

Edit 2026-Apr-8, additional info:

If you had pages on Angelfire or Tripod, it is possible Internet Archive or Archive Team (Angelfire/Tripod) has a full or partial copy of it. Maybe. Example Tripod site: GMC VAN's A-Team Extravaganza! Images are broken but the pages were saved. Obviously, it greatly helps finding stuff if you know the original URLs. The only reason I even know that Tripod page ever existed is from an email I sent to somebody back in 2006(!) I did a search through all my emails and that Tripod page address popped up, so if you've completely forgotten what that Angelfire or Tripod URL was, maybe you sent it to somebody and it's buried somewhere in an ancient email.

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