Angelfire
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  |
|
| URL | http://www.angelfire.com/ |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Free web hosting service |
| Owner | Lycos |
| Created by | Bill and Ron |
Angelfire is an Internet venture offering free space for web sites, targeted primarily at teens but popular in all demographics. In the past, it was long known for providing advertising-free hosting. (It also offered medical transcription services.) The site was bought by Mountain View, California-based WhoWhere which was itself subsequently purchased by search engine company Lycos. As Lycos already offered web page hosting with advertising through its acquisition Tripod.com, Angelfire's offering was modified to also have parity with Tripod, including the addition of an increasing amount of ads but also by offering more disk space than previously. (This was consistent with competitor offerings, such as GeoCities.)
Unlike sister site Tripod, Angelfire has often taken a more humorous slant to some matters, such as famously placing joke messages on error pages. Over the years, this additional levity has gradually become less pronounced.
As of 2005, Angelfire continues to operate separately from Tripod and now includes features such as blog building and a photo gallery builder. It also supports, for paid members only, CGI scripts written in Perl. Until May 2004, Angelfire offered free email (as a cobrand of Mailcity) at the @angelfire.com domain, but this feature has been replaced by webmail for premium users only (through Lycos Domains).
Although the Angelfire and Tripod are very much separate sites, they do share much of the same underlying software, such as the blog application.
