AOL Hometown Images & Files Still Available

After AOL shut down their free Web hosting, a lot of users’ memories were shattered. In light of this, a determined Webmaster and computer engineer, Joe O’Brien, discovered that AOL users can still access their Hometown uploads. I reached out and offered him a chance to write to you on my blog in this guest posting.

Any user who used either members.aol.com or hometown.aol.com can still access their files. This does not apply to Journal users.

As of Dec 4th 2008, many (if not most) images and files are still available to download and save.

When I left AOL about 6 years ago, I saved all my files and images via FTP, totaling about 60 HTML pages and almost 400 images.  Being a webmaster, I always used FTP versus AOL’s My Place [old-school FTP client] which was slow and inadequate. Though no longer with AOL, all of those files remained on AOL’s server all this time, but with limited privileges of download only.

Though viewing and “My Place” access disappeared on Oct 31st following AOL’s Hometown Closing announcement, files and images are still available with the same FTP setup I had created 10 years ago.

I’ve made a page showing detailed info for the FTP access and download. If you don’t have FTP, I give easy instructions on how to install and set it up.  So far, it’s worked for many users from different countries.  Either click on the “Saving My AOL Files” logo above, or just visit the link below.

http://www.taimantis.com/get-my-aol-files.html

As of today, files are still available.  Better get them while they last.

Good luck.
Joe

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Thanks, Joe for the helpful information and finding a solution for avid users of AOL Hometown! Looking at your instructions, it appears AOL only made a DNS change. The servers will probably be decommissioned during Q1 2009 — just a guess.

I scanned the subnet for servers that users can access  to save their Hometown contents. I cleaned up and filtered my results on this spreadsheet. Enjoy!