It would seem that not getting enough hits/month means the end. Oddly enough, when they told me I'd had NO hits in the last month I knew something was wrong because I KNOW I've had visitors here - they posted a form I used to have up here and friends have checked it out too.
So, I guess that LYCOS is just trying to reduce their hosting to paying customers only.
When this was just TRIPOD it was a great online community, but now it's being destroyed.
Free hosting was the way that 'ordinary' folk got to take part in the WWW adventure. Now the Internet is steadily being purged to make way for ever more commercial content.
I suppose some people would start adding salacious content to improve their hit rates, or maybe spike their content meta-tags to attract the unwary. I'll just abandon this outpost of mine and find other ways to express myself.
Just a shame to know that there must be countless thousands of others like me, whose contribution to the Internet will be lost because of the hosting companies seem to think we all should be looking upon our sites as commercial activities. Like we should be worrying about our ratings!
Over the last 20 years the Internet has gone from obscurity to ubiquity, and along the way there were many who offered free hosting, free email etc. to get us all to join in. Steadily each and every one of them (even the ones that offered 'free for life') have started charging, or making their 'free' option so unattractive that we're bound to start paying, right? WRONG!
Just you bozos remember who put you all here - it was US, the ones that jumped in both feet early on. And we're not impressed by the way you're turning the Internet into a porn/shopping mall. It was supposed to be about information sharing (remember the Information Super-Highway?)
How long before we're being asked for our credit card details simply to open a browser window?