AOL Hometown

AOL Hometown
URL	http://hometown.aol.com/[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]
Status	Offline
Archiving status	Lost
Archiving type	Unknown
IRC channel	#archiveteam-bs (on hackint)

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A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it. AOL Hometown, which itself was actually a combination of a bunch of previously acquired websites, shut down. [...] It's all fine and good, those readers who sneer and say 'you get what you pay for' and 'ha ha, losers'. But the fact is, these people were brought online and given a place for themselves. Like a turkey drawn with a child's hand or a collection of snow globes collected from a life well-lived, these sites were hand-made, done by real people, with no agenda or business plan or knowledge, exactly, of how everything under the webservers worked. They were paying for their accounts, make no mistake – this was often provided to them as a tool combined with their AOL accounts. Some were absorbed from other companies as AOL purchased them. Some of these websites had existed for a decade. [...] We're talking about terabytes, terabytes of data, of hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, crafted by people, an anthropological bonanza and a critical part of online history, wiped out because someone had to show that they were cutting costs this quarter.

- Jason Scott, Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse

AOL Hometown was a web hosting service offered by AOL. It was shut down on the Halloween Day 2008.