Today I found in my spam box the following email. It looks as though it really did come from Lycos, although for some reason they sent it to an old email address and so it got filtered.

Customer information

Dear Matthew Chatfield,

As you might have heard in the media, the management and the board of directors of LYCOS Europe N.V. have decided to liquidate valuable businesses and cease unprofitable activities. Unfortunately the webhosting business is one of these.

This means for you, that we will continue providing our webhosting services for only a limited period. A solution is sought, so that online-presences of our customers can be transferred to another provider without causing adverse effects or additional costs.

We will inform you about any upcoming changes in sufficient time. Though details are not yet clarified, we expect the webhosting platform to be operating during the first quarter of 2009.

As soon as we have further details about the planned measure, you will immediately be informed. We expect this to happen in a few days.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. We strive to enable a smooth transfer of your presence. We ask for your understanding that we cannot provide you with further information at this point of time. We also ask for your understanding that you might experience delays in response times from our support team in the next days as we expect an increasing volume of requests.

Please refrain from contacting our support team with request in this matter as no additional information can be provided by this channel at the moment.

We will contact you as soon as we have any further information.

Thank you for your patience and your understanding.

With best regards

Your LYCOS Webhosting Team

That almost certainly isn't good news. We've been using Lycos webhosting and as domain registrar for over five years. Pinkeye has several clients still on Lycos, altogether we are gradually moving them all across to our favourites EUKhost as each package expires.

If anything happens, we'll let you know. Meanwhile, if anyone's got any information - we'd like to hear it.

External link: http://www.thewhir.com/marketwatch/112608_Lycos_Europe_to_Sell_Close_Assets.cfm

Matthew and I are always taking photographs, particularly on a biodiversity theme, and have used these on several of our projects. See Wild on Wight for some of my close up photos of invertebrates and others.

Having our own photo library is great; there is usually a suitable image that we can use to illustrate our or our clients' work. However, sometimes we just do not have what we need. Take Pinkeye Graphics latest job for the Footprint Trust, for example. The brief was to design a series of postcards to publicise the Warmahome project. I had already designed a logo and poster to promote this worthy enterprise and the postcards were to be the jam.

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CAT JAMES
Designer Cat has a visual style which lends itself to producing modern and effective communications both in print and online.

Providing the style and layout of most of Pinkeye's websites, Cat can call on her extensive knowledge of 20th century design to bring out a retro classic, or her recent HNC in graphic communication to use the latest methods for her clients.

With her unusual combination of traditional 2D and 3D design skills (Cat is a qualified industrial designer) alongside a passion for online media, Cat brings a fresh and highly effective voice to an internet swamped by me-too wannabe websites.

MATTHEW CHATFIELD
A successful webmaster since 1995, Matthew has designed and managed dozens of websites including the award-winning Naturenet. Having seen internet trends and techniques come and go, he has a knack for finding the right solution.

Featuring content and usability to the fore, his clean old-school websites transparently utilise recent web developments to deliver online messages consistently for clients from CMA to Wild on Wight. Matthew's copy writing, authoring and image manipulation skills also feature on much of the offline work of Pinkeye Graphics.