(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) posted a “final notice” on GeoCities (geocities.yahoo.com), reminding users that the long-standing free web hosting service will be closed towards the end of the month.
In July, Yahoo announced it would be closing GeoCities on October 26, 2009, offering displaced users a variety of paid hosting plans. The GeoCities website advertises a $4.99 per month for a year and $9.95 per month afterward hosting plan to which users can port their GeoCities site. These plans, unlike regular GeoCities accounts, do not display mandatory ads.
GeoCities saw a significant decrease in popularity over the years, partially due to the development of social media community services.
In an effort to save the thousands of animated GIFs, blinking text, web rings and even useful websites from going offline forever, Jason Scott’s Archive Team (www.archiveteam.org) it currently migrating GeoCities sites to preserve them as historical evidence of the early Internet. Scott estimates that his team is archiving the web’s adolescence at a rate of around a gigabyte every half-hour, or about five websites a second.
Yahoo bought GeoCities in 1999 for $2.9 billion, and is considered a precursor to the slew of the self-publishing and social-media tools that shape the current face of the web today, notes cnet technology columnist Don Reisinger.
“As someone who used GeoCities to create his first personal site, I find it a bit sad to say good-bye,” Reisinger wrote. “That said, it’s about time.”
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