Back in 2010 I wrote about Demon Internet and their revolutionary ‘tenner a month’ Internet service.  Frighteningly another five years have subsequently passed and it would seem that finally the end of the legacy service may be nigh.

Since that original post the Demon Internet brand has in 2012 come under the ownership of the Vodafone Group.

This month, existing account holders have begun to receive e-mails and letters from Vodafone advising them that yet again there will be a change of ownership with possible cost implications and a suggestion that after two years all services may cease to exist.  You can read some reaction from users in the Demon Service Google Group.

A quick Google Search suggests that are still a surprising amount of ‘free’ Demon websites running, though many of them have seemingly changed little in the last 15 years or so though many through a mixture of longevity and content have been awarded strong page rank by Google.  I myself maintain a site with intentionally retro styling as a home page for my dial up BBS, Nostromo.

I trust should this change of service result in the ignominious death of many legacy websites that the Internet Archive will have grabbed snapshots of them over the years.  You can for instance view the various incarnations of my site over the years.  Here’s how it looked back in April 1997 when I was a fresher faced player of iD’s Quake.

The communications received from Vodafone advise that existing services are being passed to a company called intY LTD ‘an expert in cloud-based applications, products and services’ and in partnership with Namesco.  There are full details here.

This in turn links through to a ‘FAQ‘ the following part of which concerns me, ‘Namesco will be migrating email addresses and websites that sit under the demon.co.uk domain. You’ll be able to continue to use these for around two more years.’

This to me suggests that existing customers are looking at a two year shelf life for the their .demon.co.uk domains and e-mail addresses.  What happens then I’m not sure.  Having maintained my account for what is now 22 years I shall be very disappointed if there is no way of holding on to the fixed IP address that is included and the .demon.co.uk domain extension.

It would seem that another important part of Internet history is shortly to be dismantled and disregarded in this increasingly transient digital age.

Here’s a PDF of the e-mail received from Vodafone:-

Important Notice: Transfer of Demon Web Hosting and Domain products to intY Limited