GeoCities Shutting Down For Good

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5:50 PM - April 24, 2009 by Marcus Yam

It's the end of an era as the end is near for GeoCities.

Yahoo! today without warning updated its GeoCities page notifying visitors that new accounts are no longer available and that existing ones will be shut down by the end of the year.

“Later this year we will be closing all GeoCities accounts and web sites,” reads Yahoo!’s help section. “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.”

“We'll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer,” the company said.

Will Yahoo! be replacing GeoCities with another free website hosting service?

“No, Yahoo! does not offer another free hosting service. Instead we recommend our award-winning Yahoo! Web Hosting service, which includes a personalized domain name (such as widgetdesigns.com) and matching email, new site building tools, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, premium customer support, and more.”

It seems the internet has moved away from providing users with an open playground such as GeoCities and towards more structured, uniform systems such as MySpace.

Did you have a GeoCities website? Is it still online? If so, share it with us in the comments!

Source : Tom's Hardware US

Talkback
Add your comment
afrobacon 04/25/2009 12:15 PM
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I had one several years back for a couple days; I think it just had a bio of how I wanted to be a pirate-ninja when I grew up... Got bored, moved onto better things...

joz 04/25/2009 12:15 PM
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Good, that stain on the internet is finaly gone.

Anonymous 04/25/2009 12:20 PM
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I still have my geocities site up. Even though I haven't updated it for years, I still show it to people to read some old stuff I used to write. Guess that means I'm gonna have to download all of the data and store it somewhere else. :(

Marcus Yam 04/25/2009 12:36 PM
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afrobacon :
I had one several years back for a couple days; I think it just had a bio of how I wanted to be a pirate-ninja when I grew up... Got bored, moved onto better things...


I dunno man, there really isn't anything better that you can move onto other than aspiring to be a pirate-ninja.

michaelahess 04/25/2009 12:49 PM
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That's why I've always had my own web servers, don't need to worry about changes or shutdowns.

mrubermonkey 04/25/2009 1:31 AM
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The internet is what you make of it.

thomasxstewart 04/25/2009 1:59 AM
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Heres' Mine. People wonder About Post Commentos On theINQUIRER.net

http://www.geocities.com/tsvondras [...] EWART.html

Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART von DRASHEK M.D.

deltatux 04/25/2009 1:59 AM
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Started learning HTML with GeoCities. Ever since I learned PHP, I moved off to cPanel powered webhosts.

Maxor127 04/25/2009 3:40 AM
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beuchevy :
I still have my geocities site up. Even though I haven't updated it for years, I still show it to people to read some old stuff I used to write. Guess that means I'm gonna have to download all of the data and store it somewhere else.


Me too. Oh well.

crystal_tech 04/25/2009 4:14 AM
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hmm i wonder whats going to happen to all that data if they will delete it or filter through it and sell info. (if you read the terms they own your page and what ever you put on it)

Anonymous 04/25/2009 8:59 AM
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NOOOO!!! :'(
I've been keeping my friends geo site up for years by visiting it periodically... I told him a couple years after he thought it died that I was doing that, he was soo pissed. Guess he'll win in the end (he lost all ability to modify the site long ago) :(

LeJay 04/25/2009 9:42 AM
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afrobacon :
I had one several years back for a couple days; I think it just had a bio of how I wanted to be a pirate-ninja when I grew up... Got bored, moved onto better things...



There are better things than pirate-ninjas?

resonance451 04/25/2009 12:44 PM
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As god-awful as many of the sites were (and I mean atrociously designed) there are a lot of great independent sites set up on services like GeoCities, which I've used as resources. I hope they don't end up entirely disappearing as a result.

chrissd 04/25/2009 12:48 PM
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What many people dont know is that Geocities was one of the first web hosting companies back in 1994-95 when internet was mostly a university network. That is really an "end of an era".

Anonymous 04/25/2009 4:56 PM
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yes, me too have a site still running... sad if they will shutdown... sad sad sad...

voidrunner 04/25/2009 5:13 PM
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chrissd :
What many people dont know is that Geocities was one of the first web hosting companies back in 1994-95 when internet was mostly a university network. That is really an "end of an era".


so true. i don't know what i would be doing now if it wasn't for Geocities. I was introduced to the concept of web development (however limited) by a highschool friend who made me a Geocities account in 97.

Mr_Man 04/25/2009 5:23 PM
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I've been using it since probably 1998, but a few years ago I took the site down and just kept it so I could host a couple of files for other sites. Good thing I read this so I know to grab the stuff off of there.

megamanx00 04/25/2009 5:26 PM
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Yeah I use to put up Geocities sites when I was bored. They really fell behind the times though with their limited offerings and clumsy, intrusive advertising. There are alot of free hosting services now with less intrusive advertising, and even a few that let you host a small MySQL database and run some PHP code.

Even then hosting fees are so low now, if you really want to put up a website you can afford to pay at least like $8/mo for something ipowerweb.

NuclearShadow 04/25/2009 8:28 PM
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This is great news as it will effect a real dickhead I use to deal with years ago. In your face Dexter Loxley! Where's your messiah now?

goonting 04/26/2009 1:02 AM
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surely going to miss it... i had mine since way back 1996 on geocities

city_zen 04/26/2009 1:10 AM
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chrissd :
What many people dont know is that Geocities was one of the first web hosting companies back in 1994-95 when internet was mostly a university network. That is really an "end of an era".



I agree 100%

I DID have a Geocities website a long, long time ago. Just a home page that I think I wrote using Word 97 ... LOL

Anyway, fret not, people. Geocities may be gone, but there are a lot of free alternatives (some of them actually decent). Take a look at:
Free Web Hosting Talk

lire210 04/26/2009 5:41 PM
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lets just burn them yahoo is ok thats it................ pretty uf topic though

graviongr 04/27/2009 3:33 AM
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I had a dozen different geocities websites back in the mid / late 90's. Seems like every different hobby I had back then I would throw up a website.

It's true as someone said they really started to fall off and get a reputation for being somewhat of a joke when you had to start dealing with their horrible advertising design. I'm all for ads when you're using free hosting but man... geocities got bad, it got bad enough that I started losing interest in updating the sites.

Anyways, before all of these new apps that convert everything into HTML for you, my tool was notepad like many others, and surfing the internet for new HTML tricks.

I kind of miss making pages, but if you don't use it, you lose it. It's been nearly a decade since I have done any HTML and it almost seems hard to recall how to do iframes and other simple tricks.

Thanks Geocities for giving the early internet a place to throw up pages for free and share knowledge with the world.

Anonymous 04/27/2009 7:46 AM
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This is what evolution is. Just like old car models get discontinued, old webhosts will get shutdown. Look at the bright side, when a star is dying a new one is coming out =)

misnad 04/27/2009 9:50 AM
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Never really liked GeoCities... was a tad boring...

Niva 04/27/2009 7:10 PM
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Geocities was a victim of failing to evolve. Other sites like wordpress.com and blogger came along that simply stomped it into the ground.

It is an end of an era though, I'm glad I can look that far back and remember those times :)

zak_mckraken 04/27/2009 7:28 PM
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Marcus Yam :
I dunno man, there really isn't anything better that you can move onto other than aspiring to be a pirate-ninja.



A time-traveling pirate-ninja!

Anonymous 04/27/2009 9:17 PM
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My very first website was on GeoCities somewhere around '99/'00. Back then I didn't know a thing about web development, and I loaded it up with animated GIFs and background MIDI. I never really had much content other than some computer hardware buying guides and a few computer tips. It was taken down years ago, though. I forget whether I removed it or if it expired from disuse.

gero1369 04/27/2009 9:40 PM
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I had a Geocities site. I still have some of my pix hosted there for my listings on eBay. I don't have time or patience to update the 1000 listings that I have up:( I didn't mind paying the $5/month for access that way. HMMM...

Verdauga 04/27/2009 10:58 PM
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I had a GeoCities site for all of 6 months (many many years ago) before the highly intrusive ads just drove me nuts. At the time I could have ad-free hosting with my ISP (not with my own domain, but there is always redirects)

Honestly....good riddance...I never saw a good GeoCities website, ever.

kutark 04/28/2009 12:28 PM
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I have to admit, GeoCities was a blight upon the internet, even back in the earlier days when the majority of the populace wasn't on the net, it was still the "AOL" of website hosting, and thus, it was bad ;-).

I'm glad its gone. You get tired of trying to research something and ending up having to filter through thousands of geocities "websites" with utterly useless information on them.

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