Bored websurfers have, at some point or another, typed “www.hell.com” into their browser’s address bar just out of curiosity. And they’ve discovered an anomaly that provokes many questions, seemingly with no answers.

Well, this article explains everything behind www.hell.com that there is to know.

At a glimpse

Just in case you’ve never visited hell.com ever before, go ahead and do it now: here’s a link.

Unless the site’s ADHD creator has gone and revamped the design for the millionth time following the publishing of this tell-all article, you should see a JavaScript-based mouseover animation, a down-arrow GIF logo, and a phrase saying something along the lines of “hell.com is a private parallel web, there is no public access”. Blah blah blah, trust me – it’s all a facade.

The Pages

Beyond the current(?) homepage, there should be a Google search gateway. This can also be found on the 404 error page, should a URL under hell.com not exist.

But, as the Wikipedia article suggests, here are some more pages (mirrored here) that have existed within hell.com and related sites in the past:

• http://hell.com/ – the homepage
• http://hell.com/soul.html – hell.com’s “soul buyback program” (they just wanted money)
• http://hell.com/? – hell.com’s once-only public art unveiling event, which took place shortly before the year 2000.
• http://hell.com/X/faqF.html – a Flash animation depicting a bunch of questions flying at the viewer in an attempt to create “art”.
• http://hell.com/xit.html – one of many Google search gateways found on the site.
• http://final.org/HELL.html – a final.org (owned by the same guy) page spreading false propaganda about hell.com in order to make it appear larger than it is.

Hell.com and Final.org, both (previously) owned by Kenneth Aronson, are hosted on the same web server. Just type in ‘https://hell.com/’ and bypass the security warning to reach final.org’s homepage – a dead giveway that they are hosted on the same server since web server software cannot provide virtual hosts for two separate secure TLS sites on the same server.

Here are some other pages providing information about the site and its owners:

• WHOIS information for hell.com – reveals the sale of the hell.com domain name to a cybersquatter
• WHOIS information for final.org – reflects the original owner of hell.com
• HTTP headers for hell.com – reveals server software versioning, module information, and more server information. Matches that of final.org. (updated to hide server signature as of this article’s publishing – no joke)
• Kenneth Aronson’s website – meet the founder of hell.com. Artsy “likes to fuck with your head” type.

The Basic Idea

If you had a look at the founder’s website above, you’ll see that he’s the far-out artsy fartsy type. He also runs a website called “Nothing In The Box” where he sells boxes full of nothing at all for various prices, in case you don’t believe me.

Without coming right out and just saying it, he’s alluded to it in various interviews: he founded hell.com one day after he purchased the surprisingly-available domain name, and decided to use the popular type-in-traffic name to establish a “net.art” website where he simply messed with the visitors’ heads, provoking infinite questions in an attempt to create an obscene form of “art”.

Throughout the site’s life, in an attempt to garner even more attention, he has sold email addresses for @hell.com, he once released a public art display (mirrored above), and other various immature pranks to further stir up curiosity about the waste of bandwidth known as hell.com.

And now, although the site/domain is rumored to be up for sale on November 1, 2009, it is currently owned by a cybersquatter by the name of Rick Latona. If you read my other article on cybersquatters, you’ll know that I have a very low opinion of them, but at least this one had the decency to keep the current hell.com content up (presumably by request of Aronson).

(side note – their email service provider and the other popular subdomain bat.hell.com are both now defunctional)

Nothing To See Here

That’s all hell.com is/was: a retarded side project of a bored artist seeking money and attention. Nothing more, nothing less – there is no “parallel web” or anything, just a hoax existing for the single purpose of provoking questions within the heads of type-in traffic visitors.

While Yahoo! Geocities died on October 26, 2009, it seems that on November 1, 2009 another artifact of Internet history will also die. The only difference is, while Geocities had at least some useful content buried within it, hell.com had absolutely nothing.

Maybe that was the beauty of it, but as they say: beauty lies within the eye of the beholder. I see none.