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BT Scrap UK FREE Webspace Web Hosting Service for its ISP Customers

Saturday, Jul 21st, 2012 (7:41 am) - Score 6,109

BT has shocked customers by announcing the closure of its old personal Web Hosting service “within the next few months … because of [the] increased costs in running it“. The service was typically supplied alongside new dialup and broadband accounts.

The ISP claims that its 50Mb of free web space was only being used by a “few people“, although a quick Google search for several related addresses – “www.btinternet.com/~“, “.btinternet.co.uk” “.users.btopenworld.com” – suggests that “few” could potentially equate to several thousand users.

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Like many ISPs BT did a very poor job of communicating the existence of this service to their customers, although that’s only one reason for its decline. Today the internet is peppered with automated website creation services, blog hosting and social networking that allow anybody to setup a presence on the internet without actually needing to know how to run a website.

The writing, as they say, was most certainly on the wall and as a result most ISPs no longer offer webspace (or simply fail to promote the fact that they do). This is one of the many reasons why we have always recommended readers to take a Web Hosting service that is separate from their ISP, which makes it easier to switch provider and often also gives you better features.

BT Web Hosting Closure FAQ

What is the free BT Web Hosting Service?

This was 50Mb of free web space for BT personal customers allowing people to create their own website. It was originally part of the BT Openworld email service in the days before we got together with Yahoo! in 2004. In fact, we haven’t been supporting it since then, although we’ve been happy to let people continue with their websites.

The free BT Web Hosting service is linked to people’s btinternet.com usernames, with a website address taking the form “http://www.btinternet.com/~username”.

Why have you decided to close it?

With only a few people using the service now, and also because of increased costs in running it, we’ve decided to withdraw it to concentrate on other services that will benefit more of our customers.

Does this mean I’ll lose my email services as well?

No. This won’t affect your email services which will continue as normal.

When will the service close?

We’ll be closing it within the next few months. We’ll formally notify you of the exact date, but it’s a good idea to take action now.

Unfortunately affected customers have understandably been none too happy with BT’s move. Mr Coles, a long time user of the service, told ISPreview.co.uk, “It’s quite serious [and] very unfair for a big company to shut it down like this & say it’s costing too much to maintain only 50mb of webspace (mostly personal websites) for their existing customers, it’s a disgrace.”

Indeed some customers have been using the service for almost 10 years, dating right back to the very earliest period of BTinternet / BTYahoo! and BTopenworld. This will have helped them to build up a strong and extremely valuable reputation (SEO) with big search engines like Google. BT advises customers to setup new webspace somewhere else and to put a redirect on their old site, although this will only function until BT completes the service withdrawal and means that years of good reputation will be lost.

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It should be said that the free BT Web Hosting service was for personal use only. It was never intended for businesses and anyone using it for such purposes would be in breach of BT’s terms of service.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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