Tripod offered free and paid web hosting services, including 20 megabytes of storage space and the ability to run Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts in Perl.

In addition to basic hosting, Tripod also offered a blogging tool, a photo album manager, and the Trellix site builder for WYSIWYG page editing.

Tripod originated in 1992 with two Williams College classmates, Bo Peabody and Brett Hershey, along with Dick Sabot, an economics professor at the school.

Although it would eventually focus on the Internet, Tripod also published a magazine, Tools for Life, that was distributed with textbooks, and offered a discount card for students.

Billed as a "hip Web site and pay service for and by college students", it offered how-to advice on practical issues that might concern young people when first living away from home.

[1] Although the feature was an afterthought originally, Tripod soon became known as a place where people could create free web pages, competing with the likes of GeoCities and Angelfire.

[3] Criticizing AOL, the existing leader in this space, for its "walled-garden" approach, Peabody described the company's aims: "Our idea is to build a community through user-created and user-based content.