Yandex has announced that it will hand over its ‘Narod’ website hosting activities as early as next month to uCoz, a leading Russian website builder and hoster operating internationally. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
“Sometimes we discontinue services in part or in full – as is happening now with ‘Narod’ – if users tend not to need them anymore,” Yandex International Media Relations Manager Vladimir Isaev told East-West Digital News.
According to the NASDAQ-listed Russian search giant, most users now either create their personal pages on social networks or use professional services for more advanced websites. As a result, website hosting services do not enjoy mass demand anymore, even though their remaining users may need support from specialized companies.
Isaev could not say whether any other of Yandex’s services would be discontinued in the foreseesable future.
“Leading webhosting services have ceased to exist in the past, leaving users without an opportunity to save or transfer their content,” said uCoz CEO Evgeny Kurt, citing the cases of Yahoo’s GeoCities and Mail.ru’s Boom.ru. “Yandex has found a more viable strategic option by identifying a partner capable of supporting existing users who will continue creating websites and exploring the additional possibilities offered by our system.”
Kurt does not believe that all types of websites or webpages can be replaced by social networks. “Both are meant to work together, as there’s a certain integration and synergy between the actual website and the respective page on the social network. We are currently providing such tools and actively working on developing this strategy,” he said in an exchange with EWDN.
Founded in 2005 by a team of Ukrainian developers, uCoz offers at no charge a range of modules to build and host customized websites. Its platform, available in 16 languages, hosts around 1.2 million active websites that attract more than 150 million page views per day. The Moscow-headquartered company received a strategic venture capital investment from DST in late 2007. The DST stake is now held by the Mail.ru Group, which spun off from DST in 2010.
