Hacker News Reader

Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

20 years ago in the UK most ISPs gave you a little bit of web space free with your account - and an email box of two. One of the sad changes that happened is that this has gone now.

It used to make it really easy to have a cool little website. I used mine for a simple blog - now gone.

View on HN

i agree it was very enticing to get started, OTOH having an email address linked to a particular ISP meant people not daring to change it and having to update their email everywhere

Which makes it doubly odd that they are getting rid of it.

I have my email grandfathered in by my ISP (Virginmrdia) but they don’t offer it to new customers.

I use it with my own domain name that redirects to the Virginmedia box, so not tied to them.

I suspect the support costs are greater than the advantages to the provider. And, in most cases, it's not like there are a lot of choices of ISP. These days also a lot of choices of free providers for a simple static website--GitHub, pages on Google Blogger, etc.

If they have any kind of comments box it’s pretty ambiguous as to whether or not your personal home pages is illegal now in the UK.

Based on which law?

Online Safety Act.

TBH I wouldn't expose unfiltered comment boxes on today's internet anyway. That's guaranteed web spam plus a small but non-zero security risk.

Maybe one where comments only show up after I manually approve each one.

My understanding is that would be exempt from the regulations provided you ensure the comments are related to the content. But the legislation is super vague and IANAL.

I remember an old friend of mine moved to the Orkneys, and used the free webspace to set up a webcam and site so we could keep in touch with him. Back in the late 90s this was kind of mind-blowing!

DMCA (and equivalent legislation in Europe) killed it. It was too risky for ISPs to allow users to have unmoderated, publicly accessible digital lockers that could be used for storing MP3s.

That’s how I published my first webpage. Mindspring, baby! And then I later upgraded to a much more sophisticated web host with a cgi-bin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com