A screen shot of Yahoo!'s GeoCities page on its closing day, October 26, 2009.
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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Search engine giant Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) announced on Monday that its free web hosting service GeoCities (geocities.yahoo.com) will finally shut down the service today after 15 years.
The company posted a disclaimer on the GeoCities help page, alerting users of the free hosting service that they have up until later today to back up, move or save their pages.
The disclaimer reads: "If you do not download your files and images before October 26 2009, you will no longer be able to access that data. After October 26, your GeoCities files will be deleted from our servers, and will not be recoverable."
Yahoo! first announced in April it would be discontinuing the service after its declining usage over the years as personal web spaces began using more straight-forward and concise URLs. The search engine giant purchased GeoCities in 1999.
Yahoo! is hoping to migrate any remaining GeoCities users onto its Small Businesses web hosting service.
The company says the paid service "works a lot like GeoCities but includes a personalised domain name (such as widgetdesigns.com) and matching email, terrific new site-building tools, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, premium customer support, and more."
The service is priced at $4.99 per month for the first 12 months, then $9.95 per month after.
Meanwhile, non-profit Internet Archive digital library has volunteered to preserve the GeoCities pages of former users by adding it to its database.
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Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
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Comment by David Hamilton on Monday, October 26, 2009
Xkcd.com has been redesigned to commemorate Geocities' last day.
Comment by Anonymous on Tuesday, October 27, 2009
good job.. thanks for sharing
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