Yahoo Shuts Down Geocities

Geocities was shut down, six months after Yahoo announced that it would be doing so.  In fact in the last year, Yahoo has shut down about 20 services.

Apparently not everyone knew that it was closing or chose to ignore the announcement.  There are many people who are upset about the close.  Some feel that Yahoo is a dying breed and should be put to sleep altogether. 

While people are frantically looking for a solution, Yahoo has been promoting their reliable web hosting service for 25% off to first time signees.

Earlier this year, for example, MSN partnered with WetPaint  to allow people to create “fansites”. After Yahoo’s announcement, Wetpaint took the opportunity to announce a “bailout plan for foreclosed GeoCities properties,” which it called the “GeoCities Asset Recovery Plan (GARP).”As it shuts down GeoCities, Yahoo itself is now plugging Free Domain, Unlimited Disk Space, Unlimited Data Transfer and 25% off with Yahoo! Web Hosting.

According to Compete data, GeoCities has still been seeing over 10 million unique monthly visitors as recently as last month. Why would Yahoo want to just shut that down? Does the cost of hosting these free sites and their traffic outweighing the annoying ads?

Yahoo paid $3.6 billion in 1999 for Geocities and now wants to turn away the traffic.

I lost my web design virginity with Geocities in 1997, 1998, or 1999. I can’t remember the exact year but I know I had a great time! From there, I advanced to learning advanced HTML, CSS, XML, RSS and more. In many ways, Geocities was the first social media of its time. So like the first time, it’s best to hang on to the memory since it has been shut down completely.

I sometimes wonder why Yahoo did not sell Geocities to another company?
And then it makes me wonder what would happen to Facebook or Twitter should they decide to close their doors.

The answer is simple. If you are serious about your website, then you need to manage your own site. Having helped hundreds of professionals and businesses launch their websites, I know that it may seem daunting, but it requires someone who knows what they are doing and can translate the technical garble to you. So if you need help, use my contact form to get in touch.

Here’s what Yahoo is telling GeoCities users to do if they want to keep their sites:

On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files. If you’d like to keep your web site, you’ll need to move your site files to another web hosting provider.

We recommend moving to our award-winning Web Hosting service, which works a lot like GeoCities but includes a personalized domain name (such as widgetdesigns.com) and matching email, terrific new site building tools, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, premium customer support, and more.

What do you think about Geocities? Are you sad to see it go?

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