SourceForge is ending free personal web hosting

I’ve been involved in open source software for a long time, working on countless projects since the 1990s. In the early days of open source, projects had to find places to share their work: this was usually on FTP sites if the project dated before about 1995. But after the World Wide Web innovation in 1995, projects moved to websites.

At least in the first few years of the web, that meant open source projects needed to rent their own website hosting. For example, the FreeDOS Project website was hosted from a variety of small web hosting companies during that time. As hosting plans shifted with the “dot com” explosion, and especially with bandwidth limits, we changed hosting providers to keep up with our nonexistent budget.

That changed in 1999 when SourceForge arrived on the scene. SourceForged provided free hosting to open source projects, including websites, file management, and source control. Over the years, SourceForge added (and removed) other services, including email lists, wiki, and blogging.

As times changed, so did SourceForge. With the popularity of other blogging platforms, SourceForge eventually shut down the blog service. Same for the wiki. It just didn’t make sense to maintain a parallel service that few people used.

And this month, SourceForge announced that another of its free services will go away: SourceForge will be sunsetting developer web hosting for user accounts (unrelated to project web hosting) in 60 days on October 10th, 2025. It’s been years since I thought of their developer personal website hosting. I had completely forgotten about it. And that’s probably one reason that SourceForge is sunsetting the service.

See the announcement about the closure. SourceForge advises that “If you are using developer web hosting on your SourceForge user account, please make arrangements before October 10th, 2025. Project web hosting for projects will continue as is.”