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Free Weebly Legacy Plans With Custom Domains Are Being Discontinued. Now Pay Up. (weebly.com) 23

mmiscool writes: Email notices went out today to legacy users of Weebly's free web site hosting service. In the early days of Weebly (before being gobbled up a credit card processing company only concerned about money) you could create a very basic web site for free and point your own custom domain at Weebly to have a relatively painless web site. Now there were lots of add-ons and extra features you could pay for like shopping carts or interactive forms but you were never required to pay for the basic web hosting. Over the years they stopped allowing new sites to be registered using the free option but they did continue to honor the old legacy free plans for existing users. That ends now. An email sent out today to legacy site holders reads

This is an official notification from the Weebly account team in regards to the account under this email address. You currently have a free Weebly website published on a custom domain (or vanity URL) and are not subscribed to a paid Weebly hosting plan. As of March 28, 2023, sites connected to custom domains are required to have a Weebly hosting service plan to remain published. What does this mean for you? To keep your site published on a custom domain, you will need to purchase a paid Weebly service plan subscription. If you take no action and choose to remain on a free Weebly plan, your account information and all associated site content will remain intact and accessible to you within Editor, but your site will be unpublished on March 28, 2023 and will no longer be visible to visitors or connected to your custom domain. You will need to republish your site on a free Weebly subdomain to make it publicly visible again (ex: my-name.weebly.com).

Message received. Pay up or else.


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Free Weebly Legacy Plans With Custom Domains Are Being Discontinued. Now Pay Up.

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  • Entitlement is also disgusting. Nobody deserves free website hosting any more than anyone deserves free beer.

    Everything comes at a labor cost. It is reasonable to expect people to pay for that cost in order to receive the goods or services.

    • Entitlement is also disgusting. Nobody deserves free website hosting any more than anyone deserves free beer.

      Everything comes at a labor cost. It is reasonable to expect people to pay for that cost in order to receive the goods or services.

      For the nonprofit I am the CEO of, I'm constantly answering questions and even demands that we do one of the freebie sites. Of course the same people want all of the bells and whistles of premium website hosting.

      I tell them to duplicate our site on a test freebie site like Weebly.

      1. Suddenly it's no longer free.

      2. But they never get that far.

      Then they go away. Muttering how hard it is.

    • Entitlement is also disgusting. Nobody deserves free website hosting any more than anyone deserves free beer.

      I hate it when a non-corporation gets something they do not deserve. It really just upsets me on a basal level.

      I mean, okay yeah, it was offered to them and they accepted the offer, but presumably the offer was made in the hopes of being able to hold their domains hostage for pricey upsells, as the average customer has no idea they can buy the domain for less than $20/year. They have no right to ev

    • by shanen ( 462549 )

      Interesting FP, though negative and evidently not very productive... Were you going for Funny or just playing devil's advocate in some way I can't figure out?

      Without looking at the replies (and not sure if I'll bother unless some are flagged Funny), the greed was on the other foot here. Weebly wasn't offering free accounts as any sort of entitlement. It was part of their plan to get big, but bigness per se is not always valuable. Remember GeoCities? (And I still have a free Tripod website that mostly works

  • TANSTAAFL

  • Fuck you, I leave.

    • Oh no! A customer that used our free services and never gave us any revenue is leaving, what will we do to keep our jobs?

      I know, we'll focus on revenue producing clients!

  • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Wednesday March 01, 2023 @06:55PM (#63334287)

    Free Weebly wobbles and they *do* fall down.

    [ For you youngsters: Weeble [wikipedia.org]. :-) ]

  • As with Free Willy [wikipedia.org], sounds like a Sea World movie or porn video.

  • Seriously, I don't know what I will do without the empty Weebly site that some SEO spammer created with my e-mail address 10 years ago!

  • by sjames ( 1099 )

    So now the bottom feeders have driven the inexpensive hosting businesses that charged enough to make it worthwhile without dirty tricks out of the market, they want to start charging.

    Not that the decent inexpensive hosts weren't already driven out by even cheaper hosts that hold your domain hostage and other such tricks.

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