This is an email I recently received from my ISP:
ISP’s have offered free home page services for well over a decade. These are normally addresses that are long and not memorable, but useful nonetheless. For Road Runner in particular the addresses were usually something like home.rr.com/your_user_name or similar.
Road Runner is giving the boot to their personal home page service as of January 11, 2011. Some other major ISP’s have also dumped their personal home page service, and yours may be next.
If you currently have a personal home page on your ISP, it is strongly suggested you download and backup your files now so you don’t lose them. Once the ISP deletes your page, you will never be able to get it back.
To note, this is a trend that’s unfortunately becoming very common. AOL Hometown closed, Geocities closed and now ISP’s are doing the same thing.
Your best option for having a personal home page is to not use your ISP do to it. There are plenty of good alternatives. For example, you could use a free blogging service which is essentially the same thing.
Here’s a quick list of alternatives you can use:
Don’t know how to directly pull the files from your personal home page but want an easy backup?
Here’s a few ways to do that:
Internet Explorer 8 File/Save as
I recommend specifically using IE8 because they have a File/Save As option called "Web Archive":
This will save an entire web page in a single archive file. It’s not editable, but easy enough to copy/paste from if need be and saves all images. Any web page saved using this will look exactly the same as when seen in the browser.
HTM2PDF
The link to this is here: http://www.htm2pdf.co.uk/
Simply punch in the address of the web page you want to save, and a few seconds a PDF is made that’s ready for download. This is a great free service and the PDFs generated usually look identical to the original web page it saved.
Leave A Reply (4 comments So Far)
You must be logged in to post a comment.
MikeM
815 days ago
I never found roadrunner very useful anyway for a home page. If I recall correctly, Adelphia was better, at least I liked it better.
Either way, Yahoo, and Google are incredibly useful for home pages.
I haven’t tried Picasa on Ubuntu yet, but with all the free software Ubuntu comes with and all the photo hosting sites like photobucket I guess it doesn’t really matter much.
Thanks for the heads up, Rich.
Rich Menga
814 days ago
I might have worded this slightly incorrect. You’re correct, ISP home pages are terrible, but this is in reference to using the “personal web space” offered by an ISP to set up your own personal web site, such as home.rr.com/your-web-site. Many people use these to create simple web sites of their own and assume they will always be there. My warning is that if you do have a personal site there that you download/backup your files now so you don’t lose any content you uploaded there, and switch to something else like Blogger, WordPress or LiveJournal.
MikeM
814 days ago
Ah yes, roadrunner offered free webspace for uploading files. I think (again if memory serves me) the amount of space they gave you was so small it was hardly worth while) unless you pay for more space.
I use Ubuntu One for a few files.
On a side note, Fliker took my wife’s photo’s and she can’t access a lot of them again unless she pays a premium.
Rich Menga
813 days ago
I don’t use Flickr anymore for that reason. Once you go over 200 photos they’re inaccessible out unless you pay up for a subscription. You can access them again by downloading/backing up photos then deleting until you get to 200, then downloading the rest, then moving over to another photo service like photos.live.com.