Geocities: Gone but Not Forgotten

Yesterday marked the end of an era in free website hosting. Geocities, hosted by Yahoo, officially closed its doors to its hostees after 15 years in business – 10 of which were under Yahoo’s rule.

We have enjoyed hosting web sites created by Yahoo! users all over the world, and we’re proud of the community you’ve built.

However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways. Beginning on October 26, 2009, you can no longer use GeoCities to maintain a free presence online —

It appears users of GeocitiesPlus accounts still are allowed to have their websites up, but can no long access their files, and can supposedly upgrade to Yahoo Web Hosting for free for 5 years. Yahoo now encourages all its former users to switch to its Web Hosting to enjoy its services, for a fee of course.

Of course, who on the internet hadn’t built a crappy little website using Geocities at some point in the past? Nicknamed “Geoshitties” for its small storage capacity and bombardment of ad placement (particularly after Yahoo took over), the free-site provider non-the-less was a intricate part of the internet in the later 1990’s, along with fellow free-provider Angelfire. Truly, the internet has lost one of its key figureheads.