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Mark Agius Says:

I have used AOL to upload some web pages since 1997. If AOL remove this feature then they will lose a lot of customers who want this function.
Also as they will no longer supply us this this service they should reduce the cost by at least a third as they will only support e-mail and viewing web pages.
Any web based business that uses AOL will go out of business unless they upload a new web site now.
This means that they will still lose customers as they will have a new web address.

Posted on October 01, 2008

adachicomputech.com Says:

It’s painfully sad to hear that!
Already, affected customers have started chatting with our online support team, seeking help on how to go about this issue on their end. Our advice to everyone is that they should start searching for a comparable alternative right now. For businesses using AOL to upload their websites, take action immediately and remember that open communication with your customers will be considered “wisdom”!!
http://www.adachicomputech.com

Posted on October 01, 2008

dave Says:

Well, I have been using DriveHQ FTP Hosting service for a couple years. I would strongly recommend trying their service. They offer a full-feature FTP server hosting service that you can create sub-users, share files with clients with read-only or read-write accesss, and statically link from ebay.

Posted on October 02, 2008

Sally Says:

The people running aol are just plain stupid.  They’re cutting their own throats.  How very, very sad.
Steve Case was the only one who knew what to do and the owners strangled him at every turn.  That’s why he left in disgust.
AOL should be in the text books on how NOT to run a business!!!

Posted on October 02, 2008

ljc Says:

does this mean other stuff on aim and beta will be lost too i done deleted stuff off aol.hometown pages and jornals so does this mean the others will be gone or is aol all together

Posted on October 03, 2008

blergle Says:

This is hateful.  Not only did they only give us the *exact* thirty days the Terms states and no more, even though they knew about it two months earlier, but Live Help is down so no techs are available to help people with FTP questions, and the gateway is jammed during normal hours due to the mass rush of folks trying to rescue their web content.  I believe this is the beginning of the end for AOL--so many were sticking with paid accounts purely for the sake of their FTPspace, and everyone is livid and has no reason to stay.  I personally intend to boycott every product I see advertised on AOL pages from now on just to take that much away from their income, since they are already screwing me, a paying customer for the last ten years.  I hope others will follow my example and make them regret they forgot a stable company relies on customers and not advertisers.

Posted on October 03, 2008

Eve Olasov Says:

The really upsetting fact is that I can’t find any way to add a 301 permanent redirect to the AOL .hta access file. This would save my site and not lose my visibility at all in the transition. This is really a slap in the face. AOL needs to create the permanent redirect function for us. My entire web presence began its invention with my aol members site. This is truly a sad day.

Eve Olasov
AOL member since late 1990s

Posted on October 05, 2008

Sally Hindley Says:

AOL, as usual, won’t help anyone so here’s a site on how to move a website.
http://www.empoweradvertising.com/35/move-website-to-new-server.html

You can also, on each page of your site, right click/view source and copy/paste the content to notepad and save.

Greed is destroying AOL just like it’s destroying our whole country!

Posted on October 05, 2008

George Clarke Says:

Someone has to ask the question?

Why are you doing this?

The present program justy needed an up date to get it working better.  It has been an editing problem for a while.  Yiou did not ask us for some extra $$$. 

There is no explanation… just an abrupt cut off date and some idea about saving the work which I will try to do by adding all the contacts to my favorite places and let go of my personal work.  Especially with http://www.armmat.org The rest --- well good by. 

Wow.  I have been using these web pages linked to AOL for many years and now I will lose them.  As an artist, activist, business owner, and volunteer, the nature of my work and my life helping others will be uprooted from the web on October 31, 2008.  The hours I have worked on these sites will be gone.  What a shame.  riveredgeredord.org, armmat.org, http://hometown.aol.com/nlinsurance/index.html etc. 

I will embrace the change. 

AOL Thank you for these many years of service. 

I was going to be one of those who just drops my membership. 

I am not going to do that.  Been with you too long. 

Your friend:

George

Posted on October 06, 2008

mfinja Says:

About the only good thing coming from this is it seems AOL has unlocked outside FTP access. For a long time I couldn’t get to Hometown AOL without going through their wildly cruddy FTP setup.
I had been using Crystal FTP Pro, but at some point AOL apparently blocked outside access.
After getting that happy little email I was trying to figure out how to move 20mb of stuff one file at a time and figured it was worth trying an outside FTP utility again just in case I got lucky. Fortunately, it worked. I got it all down in about half an hour.
So, if you do have piles of stuff on AOL and need a quick way to get it saved, don’t do Hometown AOL. It will take forever and be a massive headache. Use an outside FTP utility like Crystal FTP Pro (if it’s still around) or WS-FTP or whatever other one is available. There are always free trial versions available and it makes getting stuff off of AOL doable.
Just the opinions of an AOL’er that started back in the day of the 9600k dial-up.

Posted on October 10, 2008

San Diego Highwayman Says:

Well, in light of yer recent notifacation of the cessation of the Hometown pages --

I jist gotta ask—ARE YOU PEOPLE NUCKKIN FUTS???????

I’ve been a PAYIN subscriber to yer service since 1999!

I continued to pay, even when “free” subscriptions were offered.

I’ve endured outages, work lost due to em, slowdowns of operatin speed @ “peak usage” times, the raisin of the monthly fee, the CS ads placed on the bottom of my outgoin emails, and—AND—havin to play “slap the monkey” to git a clear workin screen EVERY time I boot up my computer and log on to AOL --

first it was one x out—then it became two—NOW it is FOUR what a lot of BS—AND it takes time to load the damn popups if ya don’t x em out --

The MAIN reason I continued to be a payin subscriber is the Homepages that I spent hundreds of hours perfectin to promote my business and tell my story.

If, with the wonderous intelligence? this latest SNAFU displays, you people eliminate my homepages—what reason would you think would I have for continuing to pay for yer service?

jist wonderin ?????

Yer gonna lose a LOT of PAYIN subscribers if ya don’t continue the Homepages!
I know THEY were the main reason *I* signed on with ya ---

Posted on October 17, 2008

Peter Says:

It is not only the additionalcost of getting a new web hosting provider. The secondary cost is that by moving to a new domain I will lose all my search engine hits history.

This will result in a serious loss of business and no recompense from AOL whatsoever. I never received the email announcing this. One of my clients called me and drew my attention to the banner that AOL had kindly added to my web pages.

Now leaving them after 15 years (more or less since they started in the UK)

Posted on October 22, 2008

Mike Says:

I’ve used AOL for years, just out of habit… but AOL’s FTP site was always a dinosaur.... slow and unwieldy and awkward for uploading files… and it was down half the time, for the past few years.....what’s to mourn?  Switch to a company such as Godaddy.com that charges a few bucks a month, but provides a MUCH better FTP service, along with website hosting and domain name registration at a reasonable price.  (And bear in mind that there are dozens of places, such as Gmail and Yahoo, to get free email.)

My clients have emailed me too about the “this web page is going away” announcements.  (I never did get an email from aol about it) (Maybe it ended up in my spam folder :)

Posted on October 28, 2008

Suzanne Says:

AOHelL strikes again!  What’s next?

Posted on October 30, 2008

Andalin Says:

Unbelievable, isn’t it?! ~Moved our site to Comcast. Now that AOL FTP is gone, is there any way to let people who either type in or link to the old address know where the new site is now? Is there code to do a META refresh or a permanent move notice at the new site, now that the old site is no longer accessible?  We have been paid members of AOL from the beginning and even bought a second account to obtain more FTP space. What a shocker. Perfect for Halloween. Sad.

Posted on October 31, 2008

James Says:

I never received any letter, and I check my e-mail every day.  I put a lot of work into this.  AOL can take it’s apologies and put is where the sun isn’t supposed to shine.

Posted on November 01, 2008

Eddie Says:

I haven’t checked my emails for a while so I just found this out the hard way.  ALL my webpages are now lost.  My business is over.  I was wondering why my sales dropped so dramatically.  More importantly, thousands of hours were lost tweaking the many pages over the years.  I’ve completely lost all my respect for AOL now.  THANKS A LOT AOL!!

Posted on November 01, 2008

Ketteth Bourger Says:

AOL has once agian proven they don’t care about their customers. Absoloutly no communication on the shutdown of hometown. No e-mail, no phone call, & no letter which would have allowed me the time to download all my files with my very busy and hectic shedule. This is a load of BS. Anyone interested in a class action law suit E-mail me at only until the end of November since after the next billing cycle my e-mail address will change!!!!

Posted on November 01, 2008

Lenni Says:

I also NEVER got an e-mail. I’ve had my advertising creative portfolio on my site for over 12 years, and now it’s gone. NO warning. NOTHING.

Luckily I’d recently re-saved my long-ago uploaded .jpgs and .gifs to my hard drive. But all the work I did to build my site is gone.

So much for AOL valuing its long-standing members, eh?

Posted on November 01, 2008

Robert Tollen Says:

Well, I’ve had a support site on AOL since 1994 for patients with rare blood diseases. I would have never known my AOL Hometown site was going away if not for a single patient alerting me to the banner. A relative suggested Google Page Creator. They have since stopped new accounts but Google Web Sites is available. I transposed and move my whole site over to http://www.mpdsupport.org with simple copy and pasting, having both sites open on the screen. Check it out. I built it in maybe a half hour. It is easy, no HTML knowledge is needed. http://www.google.com/sites If anyone is reading this after Oct 31 08, and missed your open window to FTP their site before it disappeared I can tell you that building or rebuilding a site from scratch to recreate what you lost at AOL Hometown is simple, easy, fast, and you can make it into a better site then before. Its a shame AOL makes no provision for 301 redirect.

Posted on November 03, 2008

Linja Says:

AOL made a mistake when they let folks keep the AOL service including webspace for free. Why didn’t they just charge extra for the webspace?

I was able to download all my pages using Dreamweaver and I can put them elsewhere. But links to the old pages are all over the web and are now broken. AOL is not offering a temporary redirect service unfortunately.

Posted on November 05, 2008

Tony Medeiros Says:

As soon as anyone hears of any CLASS ACTION law suit against AOL, for those who have lost business income or can justify the value of their labor in creating and keeping their AOL Hometown pages going, please help the rest of us.

I would suggest one of those advertisements in the Sunday Newspaper magazine sections we see occasionally.

Thanks
Tony Medeiros

Posted on November 09, 2008

Adam Cardello Says:

I am pretty bummed out, I never recieved a letter and I lost a lot of art that I didn’t have anywhere else for one reason or another.  I really hope their company suffers over this.

Posted on November 10, 2008

Javaid Khwaja Says:

I have had substantial number of files for FTP purposes ever since 1997. They were real precious feedbacks of my students on line. There was lot of professional technical material for my clients. I never received any
information from AOL in advance. Material could not be saved. I think it is a real violation and breach of agreement with the clients.

Posted on November 11, 2008

M J Q Says:

I NEVER received any notification about aol dropping hometown. Apparently, not everyone did. I relied on it to find work. I had just told a perspective employer, to click the link under my AOL email signature, and was told later, there was nothing to see or hear. My VO & Singing Demo GONE, MY Resume’s GONE. I rely on those pages to get me work.... Its on all my cards and promo material. From what I’ve read they’ve screwed over lots of loyal customers. Soon to be FORMER! ! !
Well, this is the beginning of it’s downfall. I will be deciding where to take my business. They destroyed YEARS OF MY WORK and then “sincerely apologized for any inconvenience this may cause”. How freaking lame. I started with aol in 1995, referred dozens of people to them, and defended them against many others...And Now they PULL A CRAP MOVE Like this.
I hope they have another CLASS ACTION lawsuit against them very soon, I’ll jump on that bandwagon. They used to be a decent company, But NO MORE! ! !

Posted on November 12, 2008

Ed G Says:

...Continued from previous post…

I’m keeping my AOL email for now, but like others, the primary reason was because of the web space and all the publshed links to it and our AOL email account. Not to mention all our business cards, invoices, etc. that all will need updating as well. I just avoided the big headache for years, now, it’s staring us all in the face. No fun at all!

I’ve always built my own pages off-line, uploading them using third-party FTP programs. So I had the originals of all my pages stored on my own “confuser” and thus I luckily never lost a thing, as far as my page content goes. Can my customer still find me, though? I hope I had enough time to alert them. Only time will tell.

Those who built their pages using a web-based interface are not so lucky, unless they subsequently downloaded the content. There’s still some hope for those people.

As has been noted, http://www.archive.org will often have your site in their archives. At the least, the text will be archived. But, any images or “unlinked” files that were stored on your AOL FTP space will be lost. Hopefully, you might have the original images on your hard drives and with a little work, you can recreate your pages in some fashion.

Another alternative is to search for your site using Google. It will highlight the most current (expired AOL) link, but if you look at the listing, you’ll see a “Cached” link. Click that, and you should see the most recently spidered copy of your entire “public” site. Many web browsers have the ability to download an entire page or set of linked pages, including images. Do be careful when choosing this, you may be downloading huge chunks of data. Don’t start it without some idea of how much data you’re requesting be sent. Have a directory set up on your hard drive and verify there’s room enough to store it and time available for you to monitor the process. Perhaps try a small test first to make sure the process works for you and you’re able to retrieve things by this method.

Don’t wait too long to try this. Google will eventually discover the missing pages, the old data will be expunged and their cache will be lost to the ether as well.

All this kinda sounds to me to be a great business opportunity for people who have expertise in such matters to help abandoned AOL members retrieve at least some portions of their lost websites. I could probably be of some help, but we’re already under a large workload till February at the earliest.

Unlike AOL, however I DO care, even though I’ve never met a single one of you. Just to gauge the interest in this, email me at wrprep (at) aol (dot) com [replace at and dot with @ and . before sending] and I’ll see if I can perhaps help some people out. This is not my primary email and is usually blocked. I’ll open it up just for this experiment, but I may shut it back down just as quickly!

Good luck to my fellow (and former) AOL members.
-Ed

Posted on November 12, 2008

Tony Says:

Like most everyone else here, I had my web site on AOL Hometown too.  Mine was on since May, 1996.  I have been a paying member since 1995.  when AOL went free, I continued to pay.  I thought that since I was receiving a derived benefit from my website being hosted on AOL, it was only fair that I should put something into the pot. Stupid ME!!!!  Well, I did get the email and my files before the shutdown but the search engine positioning & links to the site are gone forever.  My new url is http://www.typewriterdepot.com and is hosted by a more respectible company.  I will start all over again. 

My parting comments to AOL staff who made this decision is, how dumb can you get?  Why walk away from business when you can charge for the service?  Are you in a self-destruct mode?  Are you actually getting paid to make these decisions?  I am certain people would have paid for this valuable service.  It’s no surprise to me that AOL is in the pickle it’s in these days.  THIS WAS THE DUMBEST DECISION I’VE SEEN MADE IN A LONG TIME.  I don’t know who’s steering this ship but it’s sad. 

Amen.

Posted on November 13, 2008

Barbara Says:

I never received AOL’s so called “letter”. How did they send it? by courier pigeon?  I went to look at my Web site yesterday and it was gone!  Thanks for the warning AOL.

I have my entire Web site backed up, but now it will be off-line for a while while I try and find another Web host server.

Posted on November 13, 2008

Virginia Says:

I am devastated. Words can not express what I’m feeling with regards to AOL shutting down Hometown without, what I feel, is enough time and notice. I only used AOL for their journal service. I paid for the full-service because I wanted to keep the journal I’d set-up. I’ve been a customer since April 2001. I went online today to write in my journal and found that the service was shutdown. My heart sunk. My 18-year old son, my only child, passed away on February 4, 2006. I created the journal site to share memories of my son with family and friends and for them to do the same. If AOL doesn’t help me I will never get these memories back.

I know I am stupid for not backing up these memories in some way. I truly believe that it was unfair of AOL to only provide 30 days notice, especially when they have users like me that do not use AOL as their primary email. Why would I since AOL does not provide true high-speed internet connectivity? I use my high-speed ISP (Comcast cable) for my email. I’ve been a loyal customer to AOL for more than 7 years. They should have done something more than the supposed 30-day notice, which included sending two emails, to alert their customers for something as serious as discontinuing the journal service.

I have two and a half years of memories and entries on my healing and grieving process after the loss of my son. I wanted to share these memories later in life with my son whom I have since given birth, who will never know his brother. I will do the best I can to recreate but it won’t be the same and I won’t remember everything.

I chatted with an AOL representative after discovering this tragedy. Of course they were of no help and said there was nothing she could do. I asked if she would at least share my need with her supervisor. She said she would follow her protocol and it would be directed to the right party. I feel like it will be in a large stack of complaints that will never even be seen, given that AOL has many unhappy customers.

I pray that AOL will receive enough complaints to matter; and that they will open the service back up for a period of time. I don’t believe that they will, but praying is all that I can do at this point.

Devastated,
Virginia

Posted on November 14, 2008

Robert Tollen Says:

Virginia, it is horrible and I can feel your pain. I had 3,000 patients with rare blood diseases counting on our AOL Hometown web site. We have migrated over to http://www.mpdsupport.org and I can tell you it is very easy to set up a site on google sites, unbelievably easy in fact. Try it. http://sites.google.com/ In retrospect it was the best thing to happen. It is now very easy to manipulate our site where before it was arcane FTP and HTML.

Posted on November 14, 2008

Virginia Says:

Thank you Robert for the comment and the information. It sounds like you had everything in your local web site directory to be able to transfer. I certainly wish that were the case with me. I’ve started a new journal on blogger and will certainly back-up my journal entries from this point forward on my personal computer in MS Word. I just pray that the many unsatisfied AOL customers will make a difference and that AOL will reopen Hometown for a period of time so that I will be able to access the 300+ journal entries I posted the past 2 years and 9 months on the AOL Journal I used, and so the many other AOL customers can retrieve their data. I doubt it will happen but I am forcing myself to remain slightly hopeful.

Posted on November 14, 2008

Marilynn Pantera Says:

With AOL shutting us down, I rebuilt our site using Homestead.com, our new site is:
http://www.robertlscottfanclubassociation.com

MY QUESTION:  Anyone ‘googling’ Robert L. Scott is still getting the old AOL/HOMETOWN site.  How do we get Google to pull up our new site and get rid of the old one?

Posted on November 16, 2008

Marilynn Pantera Says:

To All:
I posted my first comment without reading all yours above ...  I was so excited to finally find something on this situation.

I didn’t know the site was going down until someone else told me.  I then checked my email and saw ONLY ONE EMAIL FROM AOL dated Sept 30th (but I didn’t see it till Oct 26th as I was traveling and without my laptop).  AOL should have given us at least a 4 months notice with monthly reminders ... NOT 30 DAYS.

I can’t find anyone at AOL to help us.  Also, that PeoplesConnection blog they gave us is impossible to post to after the fact.  At the very least, AOL should redirect people to our new site - why isn’t AOL following up with us to make sure we’re o.k.??

Not that it’s Google’s fault, but I want GoogleSearch to stop putting up the old site in the seach and start using the new one.  It’s 2008 - there has to be a way for this to happen, but I can’t figure out how to contact someone at Google.  They have written instructions how to add something to your web page, but we can’t access our AOL web pages to make this happen.

Homestead was recommended to me.  I found it very easy to use for approx $10.00 a month for what we need.  Believe me when I say I don’t know ANYTHING about building a web page, I don’t.  They have excellent learning tools / videos and telephone help.  Good luck to all and I want to say God Bless You, Virginia ...

Posted on November 16, 2008