Once the third most visited domain on the Internet, the now ailing GeoCities will shut down permanently on October 26.GeoCities was founded in 1994 and was one of the first services offering an easy to use interface, which allowed 'mum and dad' users to publish their own websites easily.
GeoCities was considered revolutionary for its time, being one of the first free hosting services on the internet and one of the first to sort domains via their topic, e.g. finance, travel or fashion.
Unfortunately, as the popularity of GeoCities took off the topics available for hosting became many, and the site increased in complexity. The purchase of GeoCities by Yahoo in 1999 only served to make this growing problem even greater. As the dot-bomb of the early noughties took hold, and personal web hosting became affordable, the writing was on the wall for the future of the business.
By April 2009, Yahoo ceased accepting new registrations for the GeoCities service. In June, the company announced that the service would finally be closed in October this year. That day has come.
Digital archiver, Jason Scott has been working tirelessly to backup as much of the service's content as possible before its closure, which is estimated to be around 10 Terabytes of data.
In reminiscing of the service, Scott said, "...for hundreds of people, this was their first website...Your pet subject or conspiracy theory or collection of writings left the safe confines of your Windows 3.1 box and became something you could walk up to any internet-connected user, hand them the URL, and know they would be able to see your stuff. In full colour. Right now."
A golden milestone in Internet history, now gone forever.
R.I.P
My first website was hosted on Geocities back in 1997
R.I.P Geocities
I don't get why they didn't simply try and make it profitable by bringing in paid hosting packages etc?
R.I.P Geocities
I don't get why they didn't simply try and make it profitable by bringing in paid hosting packages etc?
They -did- have paid hosting packages, the popularity of Geocities was its free services.
Alas, RIP Geocities. We shall miss thee.
Like the Teej said, they did have paid packages, but the prices on the paid packages were rediculous. Result: Nobody smart paid for a Geocities package.
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My first ever website was also on Geocities, and boy was it awful
R.I.P. Geocities
Who is he and where can I find it?
Ironic :-p
First link worked for me, cba to try the second
Then all the advertising started popping up...
lol
geocities was great
not by todays standards, but i loved how anyone back then could touch on making web pages, ill miss it
Worst. Archive. Ever.
Haha
Microsoft made a mistake when it left the name MSN behind, since then all they've done is lose market share.
Yeah I know what you mean! personally I call it WLM but most people are "what?" and I have to say either messenger or MSN and then they get it
Now it's on Verizon and still nothing to it. Used to be the #1 Molly Hatchet fan site in any search engine back when it had 70+ pages and was coded much differently too.
http://www.geocities.com/cork1958/
Now it's on Verizon and still nothing to it. Used to be the #1 Molly Hatchet fan site in any search engine back when it had 70+ pages and was coded much differently too.
http://www.geocities.com/cork1958/
OMG my Absolutly su****ingperb!!!!!!
I was laughing **** loads at my desk!!!
Great!!
Thanks for all the visits those last couple days people. Must've had at least another 1,000 hits in between the day I posted this and the day it finally went down.
Well over 2 million hits in the 10 years my site was there.
Tripod, GeoCities, Angelfire, homestead... memories.
BTW- said Yahoo! web hosting isn't a new service, it's a division of their small business unit and yahoo offerred a discounted rate of $60 for the first year of service. I signed up for it, that's the best promotion they've offerred for the service. It has free domain name, unlimited bandwidth and storage.
Tripod, GeoCities, Angelfire, homestead... memories.
BTW- said Yahoo! web hosting isn't a new service, it's a division of their small business unit and yahoo offerred a discounted rate of $60 for the first year of service. I signed up for it, that's the best promotion they've offerred for the service. It has free domain name, unlimited bandwidth and storage.
Tripod, GeoCities, Angelfire, homestead... memories.
BTW- said Yahoo! web hosting isn't a new service, it's a division of their small business unit and yahoo offerred a discounted rate of $60 for the first year of service. I signed up for it, that's the best promotion they've offerred for the service. It has free domain name, unlimited bandwidth and storage.
Even when the price is not as high that used to be, but :
# PHP version 4.3.11 and support for hundreds of PHP functions
LOL, php 5 was launched 5 years ago!.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOOM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOOM
I certainly do. They offered a huge amount of space for their time, along with pretty good scripting support.
Then they just faded away after a while...
One unfortunate thing is that sometimes thee are some usefull links to it which will be gone.
Agreed!
IMO the should've kept it open somehow, I mean how much bandwidth could it possibly hog/ Cost a year.
You could probably knock one of those terabytes off if you hard-linked together all the "digging man" gifs.
At least over here in Finland, ISPs even then provided some space for webpages so I don't think anyone here used GeoCities for their own site.
I am delighted to learn of its demise. I only wish all the other advertising-heavy services would fold similarly, starting with Sky TV.
Well, its been real. Sorry to see you go. ;(
Tomorrow is the day that Geocities dies.
Granted, many considered it as the 'Eyesore of the internet' but what most people dont' realize the importance of Geocities of its time.
They were one of the first to provide free hosted websites to anyone. People could express themselves on the internet in any way they wanted to do.
You could say that Geocities is one of the biggest influence of the internet. I won't be surprised that people who made their own domain, first started off on free websites such as angelfire, xoom, tripod, and homestead.
My first website was on angelfire: "http://www.angelfire.com/fl4/trgx", first used as an RPG site, and then later on as my story site.
technically, it's my second. I lost my first site, oh well. REgardless, the site holds a special place in my heart.
It is why that the site is still up and yet preserved. I probably would've cut down half the spam I get if I'd taken down my email.
Anyway, that was my piece on Geocities. Rest in peace, geocities, you guys, in my opinion, without a doubt one of the biggest influence of the internet.
End of an era!
I remember me and some friends at school discovering it, building web sites, and linking them together. Ah those were the days... haha.
Goodbye Geocities.
I don't think I've visited a geocities URL in years.
Goodbye my friend
Will I ever love again
Memories fade but the scars still linger
-Memories Fade (Tears For Fears)
Geocities you will be missed.
I constantly use geocities to find 'The College alarmclock'. Also alot of the snes,gba,etc english patches live on geocites.
And does anyone know hats going to happen the the japanese version of geocities? If you look at some of the newr japanese publications they still use geocites, and my is it still popular there.
Geocites was the place to find fansubs,scanslations, and free software back in the day.... less than 10 years ago
There goes a major part of my 24yo life
Bascially, I made a site for something that I got really into. If I played a game and got "into" it I got all excited and made a site for it! Those were the days.
For my own sake of remembering I am going to paste my GeoCities sites that are still working as of this post date. Most of my old pages are 404s at this point, but these ones fortunately still work:
http://geocities.com/castlevania_bloodlines/
http://geocities.com/castlevania_dracula/
http://geocities.com/mononoke_beyond/pmm.html
http://geocities.com/synergybeats/ (coolest one I ever made when I discovered the power of Photoshop)
I wish I could remember ALL my old sites. I think some got auto deleted or something because I was SURE I knew the addresses but they stopped working. Either that, or I'm not getting the index page names right, because I often did not use a default index page, but rather made up my own.
I hope some of my sites are stored in those archives of Jason Scott.
R.I.P. GeoCities
At least I'll be able to say I was a part of it when it's reminisced in the future.
Last edited by phurtive on 26 Oct 2009 - 07:57
http://geocities.com/maverick.live/
Now it's on Verizon and still nothing to it. Used to be the #1 Molly Hatchet fan site in any search engine back when it had 70+ pages and was coded much differently too.
http://www.geocities.com/cork1958/
OMG my Absolutly su****ingperb!!!!!!
I was laughing **** loads at my desk!!!
Great!!
At least we have the wonderful Internet Archive out there to pull up info from it.
There was a lot of great (old) info on rpg's, house rules, and stuff on no longer printed games.
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