I Googled for the lyrics to “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” and up came [this ancient HTML document from the days of Web 2.0](https://stuff.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/poetry/poems/meanGrinch.html).
I’ve noticed that Google will often point me to these very old, rudimentary webpages that are 20 years old or so, and often hosted at American universities like MIT.
So my question is, why do these websites exist in the first place, and why do they still exist?
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As someone who spent most of her life on the internet, most websites were extremely rudimentary in the late 90s and early 2000s. If you went to a website owned by a corporation (like CNN), you would get [this](https://www.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/07/31/workstress.sidebar.wmd/) or [this](https://web.archive.org/web/20000706200310/http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/home/home.html) (from Amazon).
The majority of people who accessed the internet in 2000 were doing so via dial up internet. Something like only 6% of the world’s population had internet access in 2000 and in the United States, it was 44% of Americans with about 78% of them using their phone line.
56k a second tops if using an analog phone line and in the early 2000s, I was usually getting about 30kb. Websites had to be basic for most people to access them. A 50kb website would take 10-20 seconds to load so images were kept to a minimum.
This rudimentary style kept websites small and they never took up too much space. My website from 2002 was 1.67 megabytes and that includes a forum, roughly 45 pages, and 300 images. I didn’t have a computer at home at the time so I had it stored on 2 3.25 floppies and worked on it on school computers during lunch break.
But why are they still being hosted by universities?
Businesses that offered some sort of free hosting would often purge inactive websites and paid ones would purge as soon as you didn’t pay. They were businesses trying to make money and it’s expensive to host thousands of websites that weren’t being used.
Universities aren’t for profit so they didn’t need to purge for the sake of using that space to make money. Universities also have a much smaller population so the amount of websites being hosted on their servers is only a small fraction and websites back than were small. My 1.67 megabyte webpage only takes up 0.15% of a 1gb hard drive and by 2000 hard drives were about $10 per gigabyte and 1.67mb would of been huge by 1997-2000 standards.
TLDR: Slow internet brought basic websites that took up almost zero space on a server. Businesses purged due to financial reasons but universities didn’t. Now, in 2022, all those websites combined are probably only a fraction of a percent on a single harddrive so it’s pointless to purge by this point.
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