Owner Lycos Commercial No | Alexa rank 3,465 (April 2014) | |
Type of site Paid web hosting service Launched 1996; 21 years ago (1996) | ||
Angelfire (/ˈəndʒɛlfaɪr/) is an Internet service that offers paid space for Web sites. It was founded in 1996 and was originally a combination Web site building and medical transcription service. Eventually the site dropped the transcription service and focused solely on Web site hosting, offering only paid memberships. The site was bought by Mountain View, California–based WhoWhere in 1997, which, in turn, was subsequently purchased by the search engine company Lycos in 1998. As Lycos already offered free Web page hosting with advertising through its acquisition of Tripod.com, Angelfire's offering was modified to also have parity with Tripod, including the addition of an increased amount of advertising, but also by offering more disk space.
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Paid email
Until May 2004, Angelfire offered paid email (as a cobrand of Mailcity) at the @angelfire.com domain, but this feature has been replaced by Web-based email through Lycos Domains for premium users only.
Tripod
As of 2008, Angelfire continues to operate separately from Tripod.com 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.
Although Angelfire and Tripod are separate sites, they share much of the same underlying software, such as the blog application. Lycos brands, including both Angelfire and Tripod, were licensed to a company in the UK, which shut them down. The media announced they were shutting down but neglected to note that they were in no way related to their United States counterparts, resulting in a January 2009 posting by Lycos.
Paid service
In Angelfire, the creator may use a paid service, or a paid package. The paid service allows the user to create a home page, such as page.angelfire.com/ as well as create subdirectories, such as page.angelfire.com/newpage/. This enables the user to create sites less advanced than some other free Web hosts.
2010 to present
Angelfire received a major facelift in September 2010. It has been completely re-coded using HTML5 mark-up and now promotes the Angelfire site builder as its main Web publishing tool. The classic Web Shell tool is still active; however, it is now only accessible via $100 subscription plans.