Which web-hosting service hosted the original Hampster Dance page?

GeoCities hosted the original Hampster Dance page.

Canadian creator Deidre LaCarte made the page in August 1997 using GeoCities, then a free web-hosting service that gave users a personal site within themed online “neighborhoods.” The page was part of a competition with her sister and a friend to attract the most web traffic, and it was named after her pet hamster, Hampton Hampster.

The original site used only four unique animated GIFs, repeated in rows, alongside a continuously looping sound. Its music was a sped-up nine-second sample of Roger Miller’s “Whistle Stop,” written for Disney’s 1973 film Robin Hood. The page was initially tiny by modern standards but became a major early web fad after email and blogs spread it in 1999.

Readers sometimes remember the later commercial websites instead. Those domains were associated with expansions and unauthorized copies, but the original page itself was a GeoCities creation. GeoCities closed its original service in 2009, and the first Hampster Dance site is no longer functional.