Angelfire

Angelfire launched in 1996 as a combination website builder and medical transcription service, which explains the design sensibility. It gave a generation a free place to put a starry background, a guestbook and a shrine to a band. Lycos bought its parent in 1998 for $133 million and spent the next 28 years forgetting it was there. In January 2026 a server outage hit. Every user-made site went permanently dark, returning only error codes. Only the homepage stayed up, like a storefront on a building that had already burned. The service shut down in April 2026, alongside Tripod. No reason is on the record. None was needed.