A screen shot of Yahoo!'s GeoCities page on its closing day, October 26, 2009.
(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.
