Lycos Europe, after deciding to finish trading and selling off what they could, they will close several unprofitable services.

Amongst these is the pioneering web hosting service Tripod. Lycos announced the decision a few days ago on the service page and by sending e-mails to the users to inform them. The service will be unavailable from the 15^th of February.

I said this was a pioneering because with Geocities, they were one of the first free web hosting services in existence, a service that polemically bought by Yahoo! in January 2000 for 4.000 million dollars.

Tripod was created by two students with the aide of a teacher in 1992 and purchased by Lycos in February 1998. In December last year it registered 17% fewer visits than in 2007. Curiously this month traffic has increased due to the fact that several media and blogs are commenting on the closure.