GeoCities Shutting Down For Good

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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!

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
31 Comments Comment from the forums
  • 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...
    Reply
  • 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. :(
    Reply
  • Marcus Yam
    afrobaconI 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.
    Reply
  • michaelahess
    That's why I've always had my own web servers, don't need to worry about changes or shutdowns.
    Reply
  • mrubermonkey
    The internet is what you make of it.
    Reply
  • thomasxstewart
    Heres' Mine. People wonder About Post Commentos On theINQUIRER.net

    http://www.geocities.com/tsvondrashekmd/THOMASSTEWART.html

    Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART von DRASHEK M.D.
    Reply
  • deltatux
    Started learning HTML with GeoCities. Ever since I learned PHP, I moved off to cPanel powered webhosts.
    Reply
  • Maxor127
    beuchevyI 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.
    Reply
  • crystal_tech
    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)
    Reply
  • 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) :(
    Reply