| |
Type of business | Subsidiary |
---|---|
Type of site | Web hosting |
Available in | English |
Founded | 2001 |
Dissolved | August 31, 2023 |
Successor(s) | Vista x Wix |
Headquarters | Silver Spring, Maryland, USA |
Owner | Cimpress |
Founder(s) | Haroon Mokhtarzada Zeki Mokhtarzada |
Services | Web hosting service |
Employees | 0 |
Parent | Vistaprint |
Divisions | Pagemodo ContactMe |
URL | www |
Launched | 2001[1] | (as Freewebs)
Current status | Defunct |
Webs, formerly Freewebs, was a freemium, primarily static site-only web host founded in 2001. The service offered free and premium website hosting plans, and their own templated website building service. Unusually, Webs does not offer any dynamic content support aside from their own dynamic "apps", despite offering FTP access and allowing HTML uploads.
Webs began in 2001 as Freewebs just after the dot-com bubble. It was a start-up launched by brothers Haroon and Zeki Mokhtarzada during their last year at the University of Maryland, College Park with the help of their younger brother Idris. [2] [3] Their goal was to enable anyone in the world to express themselves through the creation of their own website. [4] Between 2003 and 2007, the company grew 1704%. [5]
By April 2007, the site recorded 18 million unique visitors a month. [3]
On November 14, 2008, Freewebs changed its name to Webs, but users' URLs remained in the freewebs.com domain unless they chose to change over. Now, new websites are given subdomains of webs.com, but the old freewebs.com/sitename format still works, even for new websites. Users can also upgrade to a premium package and receive a custom web address without a Webs subdomain.
On December 28, 2011, the online printing service Vistaprint completed its acquisition of Webs for $117.5 million. [6]
On June 4, 2012, Webs released a new version of their Sitebuilder product, called Sitebuilder3. The new version includes a new drag and drop interface, more customizable themes, and simple social media integration. [7]
In early 2013, Webs underwent a redesign of the internal site, which overhauled the user’s building experience. It involved the removal of ads, the modernization of the user interface, and the addition of a step-by-step “successful website” checklist.
On May 3, 2013, Webs introduced a SEO Booster, a search engine optimization tool that helps users identify the best keyword phrases to build into their website in order to improve its position in search engine results. [8]
In late 2020, the parent company, Vistaprint, announced that on March 31, 2021 all the paying websites hosted by webs.com will be migrated to the Vistaprint domain and all the free websites deleted, with their owners' accounts removed. This change was postponed to June 30, 2021. [9] The last free subdomains were finally shut down on August 31, 2023, with all existing domains transferred to ExactHosting.com. [10]
Webs offered a "drag-and-drop" interface and professional-looking themes for users creating a new website. For pro-level websites, there were additional e-commerce features. including unlimited "webstore" items, and Google and Facebook advertising credits. All users could also link their websites to social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.[ citation needed ]
Webs offered its own themes and site builder, as well as a selection of its own dynamic "apps" such as a blog, photo gallery, or webstore.
Free websites were limited in features and also had a Webs banner on the bottom of the screen. The company offered premium plans with more tools and features and also allowed customers to buy custom domain names.
Webs offered 80% uptime guarantee, after many customers had complained about excessive downtime.[ citation needed ]
In the Internet, a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As of December 2023, 359.8 million domain names had been registered. Domain names are used in various networking contexts and for application-specific naming and addressing purposes. In general, a domain name identifies a network domain or an Internet Protocol (IP) resource, such as a personal computer used to access the Internet, or a server computer.
A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that hosts websites for clients, i.e. it offers the facilities required for them to create and maintain a site and makes it accessible on the World Wide Web. Companies providing web hosting services are sometimes called web hosts.
Blogger is an American online content management system founded in 1999 which enables its users to write blogs with time-stamped entries. Pyra Labs developed it before being acquired by Google in 2003. Google hosts the blogs, which can be accessed through a subdomain of blogspot.com. Blogs can also be accessed from a user-owned custom domain by using DNS facilities to direct a domain to Google's servers. A user can have up to 100 blogs or websites per account.
Network Solutions, LLC, formerly Web.com is an American-based technology company and a subsidiary of Web.com, the 4th largest .com domain name registrar with over 6.7 million registrations as of August 2018. In addition to being a domain name registrar, Network Solutions provides web services such as web hosting, website design and online marketing, including search engine optimization and pay per click management.
On the Internet, .cc is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an Australian territory. It is administered by a United States company, VeriSign, through a subsidiary company, eNIC, which promotes it for international registration as "the next .com". The .cc domain was originally assigned to eNIC in October 1997 by the IANA; eNIC manages the TLD alongside SamsDirect Internet.
Domain Technologie Control (DTC) is a web hosting control panel aimed at providing a graphics-oriented layout for managing commercial hosting of web servers, intended for shared web hosting servers, virtual private servers (VPSes), and dedicated servers. Domain Technologie Control is free software released under the GNU LGPL v2.1 license. It is fully skinnable and translated into several languages.
.la is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Laos.
Tripod.com is a web hosting service owned by Lycos. Originally aiming its services to college students and young adults, it was one of several sites trying to build online communities during the 1990s. As such, Tripod formed part of the first wave of user-generated content. Free webpages are no longer available and have been replaced by paid services.
TV.com was a website owned by Red Ventures that covered television series and episodes with a focus on English-language shows made or broadcast in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Originally launched by CNET in the mid-1990s, the website was transformed in 2005 when CNET acquired the website TV Tome and incorporated its assets into the new website's composition. CNET Networks, including the TV.com site, was later purchased by CBS in 2008. In its heyday, TV.com emphasized user-generated content listings for a wide variety of programs that included episode air dates, descriptions, news, season listings, notes, credits, trivia, and a forum section.
The domain name .tel is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. It was approved by ICANN as a sponsored top-level domain, and is operated by Telnic. Telnic announced in January 2011 that over 300,000 domains had been registered since the start of general availability on 24 March 2009. A substantial drop of mostly IDN .tel's occurred at the beginning of 2014. The total number of registered websites under .tel as of 9 October 2023 is approximately 43,227.
DreamHost is a Los Angeles-based web hosting provider and domain name registrar. It is owned by New Dream Network, LLC, founded in 1996 by Dallas Bethune, Josh Jones, Michael Rodriguez and Sage Weil, undergraduate students at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, and registered in 1997 by Michael Rodriguez. DreamHost began hosting customers' sites in 1997. In May 2012, DreamHost spun off Inktank. Inktank is a professional services and support company for the open source Ceph file system. In November 2014, DreamHost spun off Akanda, an open source network virtualization project. As of February 2016, Dreamhost employs about 200 people and has close to 400,000 customers.
MSN Games is a casual gaming web site, with single player, multiplayer, PC download, and social casino video games. Games are available in free online, trial, and full feature pay-to-play versions.
MobileMe is a discontinued subscription-based collection of online services and software offered by Apple Inc. All services were gradually transitioned to and eventually replaced by the free iCloud, and MobileMe ceased on June 30, 2012, with transfers to iCloud being available until July 31, 2012, or data being available for download until that date, when the site finally closed completely. On that date all data was deleted, and email addresses of accounts not transferred to iCloud were marked as unused.
FindArticles was a website which provided access to articles previously published in over 3,000 magazines, newspapers, journals, business reports and other sources. The site offered free and paid content through the HighBeam Research database. In 2007, FindArticles accessed over 11 million resource articles, going back to 1998.
Xtube was a Canadian pornographic video hosting service and social networking site based in Toronto, Ontario. It was established in 2006 and is notable for being the first adult community site to allow users to upload and share adult videos. Xtube was not a producer of pornography, instead it provided a platform for content uploaded by users. User-submitted content included pornographic videos, webcam models, pornographic photographs, and erotic literature, and incorporated social networking features.
Wix.com Ltd. is an Israeli software company, publicly listed in the US, that provides cloud-based web development services. It offers tools for creating HTML5 websites and mobile sites using online drag-and-drop editing. Along with its headquarters and other offices in Israel, Wix also has offices in Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Lithuania, Poland, the Netherlands, the United States, Ukraine, and Singapore.
Jimdo is a German website builder privately held and headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, with offices in Munich and Tokyo. Jimdo has two products, Creator and Dolphin, offering free and paid plans.
Yola is a website builder and website hosting company headquartered in San Francisco. However, it was founded in Cape Town, South Africa. People without programming and graphic design skills can make web sites using Yola. Its drag and drop system allows users to incorporate widgets without knowing HTML. Yola also integrates e-commerce and blog software and acts as a domain registrar. It competes with other web hosting and creation such as Wix, Weebly, Jimdo and Webs.
AOL Hometown was a web hosting service offered by AOL. It offered 12 megabytes of server space for AOL subscribers to publish their own websites, and included a 10-step form-driven page creator called 1-2-3 Publish and a WYSIWYG online website builder called Easy Designer, neither of which required knowledge of HTML. In 2001, AOL Hometown estimatedly had 11 million websites and a new website was added to it every eight seconds. By 2002, AOL Hometown had grown to 14 million websites. It was shut down on 31 October 2008.
SiteGround is a web hosting company, founded in 2004 in Sofia, Bulgaria. As of April 2023, it provides hosting for about 2,800,000 domains worldwide. It provides shared hosting, cloud hosting, enterprise solutions, email hosting, and domain registration. In 2019, the company employed about 500 people. It has offices in Sofia, Plovdiv, Stara Zagora and Madrid.