Yahoo Pulls The Plug On Geocities

[Ash-Bash 0]

Yahoo pulls the plug on GeoCities

 

Yahoo paid $3.57bn for GeoCities in 1999

Yahoo is to close its personal web hosting site GeoCities later this year.

In a statement, the firm says it will no longer be accepting new customers and will focus on helping "customers build new relationships online".

Yahoo bought GeoCities for $3.57bn at the height of the dotcom boom in 1999.

At its peak, GeoCities boasted millions of active accounts, but it has since fallen out of fashion, with users migrating to social networking sites.

Yahoo says that existing GeoCities accounts will remain live for now, although it stresses that users should start looking for alternative sites.

"You don't need to change your service today, but we encourage anyone interested in a full-featured web-hosting plan to consider upgrading to our award-winning Yahoo! Web Hosting service," the firm said in an online post.

The closure of GeoCities spells the end of Yahoo's free hosting, although other services - such as e-mail accounts - remain unaffected.

Rupert Goodwins, editor of the ZDNet website, said the closure of GeoCities was the end of an era.

"I think GeoCities was the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet.

"It was a fascinating experiment in the pre-industrial era of the internet, but after the initial exuberance on what the web could do, it turned out to be more complicated than just giving them free hosting.

"You need to give users tools to actually do things and make things simple, one of the reasons sites like Facebook and MySpace are so popular," he said.

 

I really cannot believe that Yahoo have done this, Although I never used this service of there's there are very good sides of the argument to or not pull the plug on it. I can also understand why during this credit crunch year. However I am sure they will bring this or something Identical to it back.

 

- Ash

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

Well i personally think it's about time. I used to use geocities, and although it is useful for the new website builders, there are programs out there that will assist people to start off their website in similar, if not better, ways that geocities did it. And heck, they can come to places like Xisto and get better hosting for their website than on geocities offers with that annoying ad on the side of all their web pages. From what i remember correctly, i actually switched out of geocities because it was holding me back in my website building as far as what people can do to customize their site. But heck, just my opinion/experience.

[TheDisturbedOne 1]

At one point I had a Geocities account, but I found that yahoo's system isn't really good for advanced web designers. Even though it is free, the limits were very low, and I was suprised that yahoo didn't put ads on Geocities accounts. This move may be bad for people who are just starting to understand the web, and want to build a simple website, because web hosting would be too advanced for them. Even so, I think that Lycos still has their free website service, and I know that Angelfire still does, even though their sites are infested with ads. If I were first creating a website, I would actually go with freewebs.com. They have a great site builder, and last time I checked there was no bandwidth limit.

[Xalor 0]

Freewebs and its slew of hosting services, like SynthaSite, are bandwith based, of 50MB per month which is pointless because there is little you can do with that, so hosting you videos is impossible, if you do something with FreeWebs its almost forced that you link it and embed it instead of directly streaming, keeping it withing less than 10kb per page, so you don't max out and have it go down. I recommend actually Business Website Live or something like that Microsoft, its free for the year, so you can experiment there, and learn more and finally get to the level of Xisto and running a host and starting with scratch other than hosting and Fantastico. I was never really a fan of GeoCities, it was too Yahoo(ish) to me. I don't like Yahoo because its full of bloat, too hard to sign up and do other things with it.

[tux3d05 0]

i dont really know what geocities is... but WHY THE HELL WOULD THEY GIVE IT UP AFTER SPENDING 3.57bn on it, i mean that is just so stupid because if you are going to spend that much money on something you WILL want to keep it because then that will just be a waste of money and everything they did would be for nothing... besides things like freewebs are better because at least i actually used them and their easy to use and its FREE

[Saint_Michael 3]

Geocities was one of first web hosting sites I used to get into web design, created quite a few website to help hone my wonderful skills. Lets be honest, a large portion of Geocities was lost when they did the forced ads awhile back and then with the lack of space and tools they lost even more customers. So they only had those who went with paid hosting and even then they lack great stuff as well and so it was just a matter of time and internal problems in Yahoo saw the fall of Geocities.

[networker 0]

I'd probably think that there are a lot of better alternatives to Geocities these days.As far as I understand Geocities at least at one time,wasn't very versatile at allwith things such as php and mysql if any.It never impressed me and that's why I never used it.

[TheDisturbedOne 1]

The reason why Yahoo did away with it after spending so much money on it is either because they made enough money on it, or because they were losing money on it. I highly doubt that Yahoo didn't make up for the billions of dollars spent on Geocities, after all they have a lot of ads.I didn't know that freewebs had a bandwidth limit. Maybe webs.com is better now.

[mahesh2k 0]

I feel sad with their decision. i was the user since 1999, and i joined their network with member groups/webrings etc. I used to have page for their area51 group. the page was about johny quest cartoon. really, missed those web mastering days with HTML . but seriously, this is good decision. as yahoo was facing lot of financial burden as hosting was making very less revenue for them. and serious developers left geocities long time ago. let's say in 2002 perhaps. and good decision is to ask current visitors to either move to other services or upgrade to their own paid hosting plans. but very few will do that actually. as there is very bad reviews floating on the internet about Yahoo's paid hosting and support.Dreamhost found opportunity in this and they created campaign to attract geocities members to dreamhost for free. just have to put promo.html page with content "i'm off to dreamhost". and in signup form you've to point to this url. that will give you hosting for 2 years. really nice deal for geocities users. and excellent marketting strategy from dreamhost.