Mozilla leaves Solo website owners to go it alone as hosting shuts down

If you have one of these AI-generated homepages, you'd better download and save it quick

Solo, Mozilla's LLM-powered website builder and hosting service, is shutting down. All sites and data will be deleted on November 30.

Mozilla launched Solo in December 2023 as a "Mozilla Innovation Project," aimed at helping sole traders to build themselves a webpage for their services. Some 54,000 people used its LLM to build pages, and relied on Mozilla to host them – complete with custom domain names.

Well, not any more. Now the Soloist.ai homepage says: "We've made the difficult decision to close Solo. We have appreciated all of your support building and growing this product, and the feedback we've received from all of you. Solo will cease operations on Nov 30, 2026."

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Users now have just over two weeks left to find a new home for their pages, although Mozilla says it first notified them on October 1. According to the support FAQ, users can download a ZIP containing an HTML export, contact form and newsletter submissions, and a CSV linking to their images.

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The images themselves must be downloaded separately. Domains purchased through Solo Domains must also be moved to Name.com, with Mozilla handling the transfer after users create an account and supply its code. So much for having the fiddly bits taken care of.

It also points at a couple of other bot-based site-generating services – in case all this feels like a bit too much. We suspect that for the sort of technophobes that this was aimed at, it very probably will.

Mozilla told The Register: "Experimentation is an important part of Mozilla's mission to make the internet better and give people more choice and control online. Sometimes, that means making the decision to bring a product to an end. Solo will officially shut down on November 30, 2026. We initially notified customers on October 1, providing a 60-day transition period, and have been offering support to help them download their website data and migrate their domains purchased via Solo Domains to another hosting provider."

It seems that some 54,000 users were not enough to keep it going, and we can see that this would cost money to keep running. An HTML export is a start, though the FAQ doesn't explain how much work it will take to get a complete, functioning site running elsewhere.

Buried in the dark recesses of the web is this vulture's own nearly 30-year-old homepage, created using a mixture of Claris Home Page (which was excellent) and Microsoft FrontPage (ever so slightly less so). We saw what a mess machine-generated web content was back then, and thanks to LLMs, we suspect it is almost infinitely worse now.

Mozilla might have made a few bucks by finding a commercial partner to take on its users, and perhaps through them offer a paid site-and-domain transfer service. As we noted last year, it seems not to have negotiated anything with KaiOSTech, which maintains and sells what used to be the formerly FOSS FirefoxOS for use on low-end smartphones.