Editing Fansite (section)

==History==
In the late 1990s it was a lot more common for an individual to host their own website than it is today. It was not an option at the time to simply use one of the well-developed large-scale general-purpose social media platforms that exist now. Creating a permanent space dedicated to many aspects of a specific fandom often necessitated hosting a fansite, so as to allow room for numerous subtopics and to create dedicated website features which were not possible by using generic forums or chatrooms contemporary to the time.

Although many people did host fansites on their own web servers, it was easier and more common to use free website hosting services such as [[GeoCities]], [[Tripod (web hosting)|Tripod]], [[Angelfire]], or a smaller consolidated web hosting service offered through an [[internet service provider]]. These free website hosts were the home of tens of thousands of fan sites and fan pages. They would offer a [[subdomain]] or a [[Directory (computing)|subdirectory]] to upload site contents into, then typically later, popular sites would migrate to an independent domain name rather than keep the name of their free host in the [[URL]]. Sometimes these free hosts would offer a [[web template system]] to make it easier to start a website, but knowledge of [[HTML]], [[CSS]], and sometimes other backend web technologies, was generally still required.

Hobbyist webmasters launched and built fansites around many topics, such as videogame franchises and entertainment brands (TV series, movies, bands, actors). Nearly all fansites had some type of [[Internet forum|forum software]], such as [[vBulletin]], [[phpBB]], or [[Invision Community|Invision Power Board]] so that it was possible for readers of the fansite to engage with each other and communicate.

Independently run fansites peaked in relative popularity around 2005. As the internet matured, many of the previously fragmented communities consolidated under new fledgling tech giants. New website offerings did not require users to understand the technical hurdles required to format and build custom webpages as was previously necessary to have a presence online. In the mid-to-late 2000s, fan communities started to migrate to platforms such as [[Fandom (website)|Fandom]] (launched in 2004 under the names Wikicities, later Wikia), [[Reddit]] (launched in 2005), [[Tumblr]] (launched in 2007), [[Facebook group]]s (launched in 2010), and [[Discord]] (launched in 2015). Short public discussions between fans additionally migrated away from fansite forums to places such as YouTube (launched 2005), Twitter (launched 2006), and [[Pinterest]] (launched 2010).

Fansites operated and hosted by individuals are still created and persist today, but have become less common. Most traditional needs of fansites are able to be met by the social media platforms and services that replaced them. Additionally, because these services host many different communities, they are able to benefit from consolidated hosting infrastructure costs, access to a large existing user base when new communities are formed, and user familiarity with an existing website interface shared between multiple communities. In contrast, the benefits of creating and maintaining a fansite without help from these modern services include: greater freedom over website functionality, more flexibility to style webpages without conforming to a unified appearance, and independence from centralized services not directly controlled by fan communities. However, these benefits come at the cost of designing and hosting a website on a [[World Wide Web]] that is far more complex and competitive than in decades past, when fansites more commonly thrived.