it is very hard for me to maintain, because I can't do stuff with it I'd like

it focuses on 'weirder', less covered games

Posted by Delos at 20:32 on September, 13th 2002:

If I was a newbee and I wanted to start a site I wouldn't know where to begin, it's not like there is a sign saying "free protected data storage", they don't know to come see you Creo.

And it was a qualified comment, back then there were no protected servers, we had to wait until an account was shut down by the company we uploaded the games to, but these days there are 3 or 4 servers providing the whole community.

Hosting issues
Up until '99, the Abandonware scene was through and through a 'hobby' one in this issue. Sites were put on free hosts, some of which were better, some worse. But the surprising thing (from today's point of view) is that they actually could stay there! Abandonware was still a very new phenomenon, there were only very few sites, most of which were small - 100 games already counted as a huge archive. That is why free hosters didn't really have to care about it - or maybe they weren't even aware of it all that much.
In '99 though, with the rising of many huge sites like Home of the Underdogs, the hosts switched to a more aggressive stance. While they had at first only asked the webmaster to remove the copyrighted contents (if they did anything at all that is), they now began to delete offending accounts on spot! And they apparantely began to actually search for those accounts and didn't wait for them to be reported anymore.
The next step was a logical reaction from the Abandonware webmasters: they began to move to paid hosting and dedicated servers. The first 'securely hosted' sites with domains were probably the Gamingdepot (on Output's Surfsolutions server) and Tox Games (on Tox' own server).
For most webmasters, 'life' went on as before though - just that they had to re-upload their files more often and 'carmouflage' their accounts better. Common techniques for the latter were renaming downloads to .bmp, spread files across various accounts, put up fake pages and all that stuff.
From early 2000 on, domain names got more and more common. These webmasters sacrificed their anonymity by that, sometimes grudgingly (as a side-effect of having a good URL), but in most cases with the proudness that they don't have to hide for what they're doing. These 'domain-based' sites were mostly hosted on other people's dedicated servers.
The situation with the free hosts grew even worse with every week that passed. At some point it was obvious that sites could only survive for long if they were hosted on some dedicated server. That or they were doomed to stay small forever. More paid hosting accounts and servers were set up, but it's still not nearly enough to provide enough resources for the existing sites.
Today, most sites still start up on free servers. But in many cases it's also webspace from ISPs. If they're lucky, they're offered hosting by someone. Otherwise, they have a hard time once their site grows.


Famous free hosts
There were some 'famous' free hosts which each were very popular during their time. First of all, there was Spaceports which was known for tolerating Abandonware. This was achieved by the friendship between the Abandonware webmaster Dr Cow (webmaster of Abandonware and Beyond) and the owner of Tera-Byte of which Spaceports is a subcompany. From late 2001 on, the quality of Spaceports' services dropped drastically though: they added lots of ads, put up bandwidth restrictions and even started kicking sites. Even Dr Cow's own site was deleted (with the excuse it happened 'by accident')! Nowadays, Spaceports has become almost unusable with many unclosable pop-ups and all that stuff.
In 2001, f2s had its heyday for a short period of time. They offered 25 MB of free webspace without any ads. In addition, their servers supported Perl, PHP and MySQL. In spite of their servers not being the fastest, many sites used it to host their sites (without downloads) - especially the scripted ones. f2s closed their free hosting service a short time later. Maybe it was just used too much...


Organised scene-internal hosting
There have always been efforts from the owners of secure hosting to provide some service to other webmasters - in other words: to host their sites. In '99, there was Pheature Solutions which offered 30 MB on Output's dedicated server. It died with its webmaster's departure from the scene. In 2000, TUOL offered hosting (50 MB) on Tox' server in exchange for one banner per page being displayed. No new sites were taken anymore after a short time, the sites which were already on the server could stay though. In November 2000, the Abandonware Ring started a hosting service on their dedicated servers. They offered 'virtually unlimited' space for one banner per page. As popular as this offer was, the quickly it died again (sites were kicked in February 2001) when it became obvious that the bandwidth requirements could never be financed with just this one banner. Many sites had to look for a new home suddenly, many even died.
At the moment, there are no open hosting offers. Complete site hosting including downloads is normally provided on a basis of friendship between webmasters, not via submission form.

You asked about why we think it's going downhill, and my answer is it's running out of puff because of little things like this.

If I was a newbee and I wanted to start a site I wouldn't know where to begin, it's not like there is a sign saying "free protected data storage", they don't know to come see you Creo.