[Findecanor]

I remember a web when practically every ISP allowed you to have a "home page" hosted with them. Your home page was situated in the "public_html" directory of your home directory on their server — hence the name.

Then the URL was http://www.<hostname.domain>/~<username>

I haven't see an URL with a tilde ('~') in it in a long time.

Why did ISPs stop with this service? Was it to curb illegal file sharing?

[titzer]

Universities still have this--well, ok, at least for Faculty :)

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~btitzer/riff.html

I actually haven't had a homepage for a long time because of the lack of the easy "put my home directory on the web", but I'd like to go back now to doing that.

[chasd00]

i think Apache sets this up by default or use to. Every user on Linux would get a www, or maybe it was htdocs, folder in their home directory when they were added to the system. Any file you put there is served by Apache at resource /~<username> which was reading from /home/<username>/www on the file system.

There use to be lots and lots of ISPs and so they were small enough to have a single webserver with all their customers setup as users and Apache serving content. They'd also setup FTP on the same server so you could get your html files into your www folder. Software like Dreamweaver had a ftp client built in, so you'd click like a "publish" button and it wold login to FTP and transfer your files.

i would imagine this went away because it got expensive as the customer base grew and ISPs consolidated and it made no money. Other options with php, mysql, and other services cropped up and could offer more and charge for it so I think ISPs just preferred to concentrate on network access and not hosting websites.

[pvtmert]

Apache doesn't have it on by default but easy to turn it on. It's called usermod or mod_user. By default it's the ~/www directory. So, anyone with /home/<name>/www ends up being site.url/~<name>/

It is also possible to add .htaccess and other things there, like username/password challenge (WWW-Authenticate) into that on per-user basis.

Mostly universities had hosting setup the same way. ISPs would also offer a similar thing with an additional fee to your internet-subscription. They mostly provided FTP to upload files. Nowadays if anyone tries to, it will be a SFTP rather than FTP.

[graypegg]

I've seen a few around on HN actually! Though they tend to be university systems, or pages hosted on https://tilde.club/

[torginus]

When this was a thing that people used, there were tons of free services (in the style of geocities) that offered the same basic functionality (often with a paid tier that was a bit more functional).

They gave you a sub url, like mypage.hostingsite.com and ftp access where you could upload like 50mb of data.

I remember running my website in high school, and so did a ton of people, a significant number of whom I wouldn't describe as particularly technical.

I think my ISP offered a similar service but it was both less generous and much harder to use. I don't think a lot of people of people used those.

If you needed/wanted more, you could use your old crappy PC to host a webserver - just install a LAMP stack, phone your ISP to give you a static IP, and buy a domain from your pocket money.

One of my friends used to run a somewhat popular PhpBB based Counter-Strike forum, and even caused some noteworthy drama online, when his parents unplugged the PC because they said it was using too much power , and the forum was down for like a week.

[sumtechguy]

Think it had more to do with the consolidation of the ISP space.

I used to have my choice of dozens of ISP's. Now if I am lucky I might have 2 or 3 from very large companies that did the math on keeping that going. It mostly happened when ADSL and cable took over. In most areas that meant only 2 or 3 companies could actually provide anything at speeds their customers wanted. Think at the time they always said it was cost cutting.

[huijzer]

Nowadays you could use Vercel, Render, Netlify, or Cloudflare for free. Most even have a drag and drop interface.

[rokkamokka]

Likely demand dropped and when the infra hosting it was needing replacement it just never got replaced

[amlib]

The ironic thing is that each subscriber now has a dedicated computer many times more powerful than what ISPs had back in the day for hosting ALL those websites sitting in the most privileged part of their network, being online 24h and begging to be used for small hosting tasks like this: their ISP provided router. It even serves it's configuration panel through html and a webserver for crying out loud!

Unfortunately reality is such that those are closed systems with historically abhorrent security and ISPs usually forbids the user from properly providing their own choice of router.

[squeefers]

> Why did ISPs stop with this service? Was it to curb illegal file sharing?

why dont you replace it with petabytes of free hosting for people, along with the bandwidth to serve it? moneys obviously no obstacle to you