[Keyboard Cowboy]

Releaselog | RLSLOG.net Yahoo closes Geocities webhost after 15 years

Yahoo closes Geocities webhost after 15 years
Yahoo announced Thursday that it will shut down GeoCities, the Web site building business it acquired a decade ago. “We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways,” Yahoo said in a statement. “We will be closing GeoCities later this year.” The closure is part of an effort to streamline operations at Yahoo, a plan that chief executive Carol Bartz outlined in more detail during the company’s Tuesday earnings call. “We are increasing investment in some areas while scaling back in others,” according to a spokeswoman. “For example, after careful consideration, we recently discontinued products such as Yahoo Briefcase, Farechase, My Web, Yahoo Audio Search, RSS ads, Yahoo Pets, Yahoo Live, Kickstart and Yahoo For Teachers, and outsourced Launchcast radio to CBS. We continue to evaluate our portfolio of products and services on a regular basis, and plan to share details of further changes with our consumers and partners in the months ahead.”

People with existing Geocities Web sites can still access and add content to their sites, but they will be shut down by the end of the year. “You don’t need to change a thing right now — we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible,” Yahoo said in a FAQ on the Geocities site. “We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time.” The company urged users to upgrade to Yahoo Web Hosting service. Yahoo purchased GeoCities in January 1999 for $5 billion.

I am surprised that Yahoo took this long to make the choice.
Then again, I sure that GeoCities is loosing out to a lot of places like PhotoBucket and MySpace as most of the website there were personal sites.

[Saxon]

I haven't seen a site on there for years, I thought it was already closed down.

[Baez]

Same here. I see mostly blogspot stuff nowadays. 7-8 years ago all you pretty much saw were geocities pages.

[SparkMonkeyHellion]

yeah, I had a geocities personal for a while until I discovered myspace... however I want to create a web page for my biology projects and I don't want to do the typical godaddy thing. Are there geocities-like sites still out there which will allow free hosting of small sites?

[Saxon]

Yes but they are all either slow, over-ridden your content with adverts or your content becomes there intellectual property or worse.

[c0rr0sive]

I usualy use Tripod and Bravenet for cheap/free websites....

[carnageX]

I used to use FreeWebs for some stuff.

[SparkMonkeyHellion]

or your content becomes there intellectual property or worse.

OH WOW. Glad you mentioned that considering that some of what I want to put up would be science experiments - of course I wouldn't want them to be able to claim credit for it.

[hikaricloud]

Crap, I just registered a domain not too long ago. And Andi's website is hosted there...we were kinda waiting till we had them all together before we got actual hosting options. Lovely.

[Saxon]

Godaddy aint much a month hakiri.