Extra.hu

Extra.hu
URL	http://extra.hu[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]
Status	Offline
Archiving status	Lost
Archiving type	Unknown
IRC channel	#archiveteam-bs (on hackint)

extra.hu was one of the first free Hungarian webhosting services, and, until its closure, also one of the most significant ones in Hungary.

History

Started in 1999 (or late in 1998, Wayback Machine made the first snapshot on 1999-01-17), and then it offered 6 MB storage + email for free. It seems it quickly became popular, as in November 1999, they stated they stored 110 GB user data, although they offered 20 MB per user that time. This time it was operated by stop.hu.

In 2002-2003, the service seems to have been offline, as Wayback Machine didn't make any snapshots. In the beginning of 2004, they indeed stated that the service hadn't been available "for some time".

The storage space remained 20 MB until 2005, when extra.hu was reformed after being bought up by Jasmin Media Group. With the transition process, unknown number of old websites were lost, as they weren't transferred to the new system automatically. (Until that, extra.hu/<USERNAME> was the structure, and <USERNAME>.extra.hu afterwards.) With the new system however, 1 GB storage, e-mail, MySQL, PHP was available, all free and without ad banners. In 2005 this was, and for long remained, unprecedental on the Hungarian hosting market.^{[source needed]}

In 2007, extra.hu offered 2 GB of storage, and additional services, like blog, gallery and chat video were introduced, still all for free.

In 2008, DoclerWeb bought up extra.hu, and in the same year, its subsidy, DotRoll became the maintainer. They kept the service running, but as time passed, users started to experience technical problems and lack of support. In 2009, creating new accounts got disabled. (The service was far from perfect earlier too.)

Shutdown

In January 2010, DotRoll announced that they discontinue their free hosting service on 2010-03-31, and offer only paid service. However, those who already had an account, could subscribe for a discount plan; and users could also choose to keep just the domain, for an even smaller sum. In their accompanying press release, DotRoll admitted that since they took the service in September 2008, they used it as a test platform of the services they wanted to build into their paid plans. "Whenever we wanted to test a feature under heavy load, we put that on Extra." They also wrote: "Sometimes other development companies also got us to do a stress test. In such cases we invisibly embedded the page to be tested into the users' service panel."

"Extra.hu is a piece of Hungarian web history. During its heyday before suspending the subscription, it was actively used by hundreds of thousand websites, and was visited by more than 300,000 people daily."

With the transition, unknown number of websites were lost, however, it seems that also a lot of people chose to pay and keep the domain. Many ones migrated to other free hosting providers.

For the domains of those who didn't buy the domain until the closure date, from May an auction started, and lasted for months, offering a few domains at a time. (The websites were not available any more that time.)

Servers of extra.hu "ceased" in fall 2010.

Today, DotRoll includes an extra.hu subdomain in its plans. extra.hu itself redirects to docler.com.

Further reading (in Hungarian)

• Extra.hu museum (Jan 2010)
• Press release (Jan 2010)
• How did extra.hu work? (Nov 2010)