Sunnyvale, California — Search engine giant Yahoo last week on the GeoCities website announced that it has finally decided to pull the shutter on it free web hosting sites and the entire service to rest, stating that GeoCities will cease to function on October 26, 2009.
Last week, the company posted this message on the GeoCities website:
“GeoCities is closing on October 26, 2009,” the message said. “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 would like to move your web site, or save the images and other files you have uploaded online, then please act now by downloading your files or upgrading to Yahoo! Web Hosting,” Yahoo said.
Introduced in 1994 during the early days of the web, GeoCities offered a great place for aspiring webmasters to launch websites. For many GeoCities was where our first website lived. It could also be considered one of the web’s first communities. What we thought was so cool back then would hardly suffice today with all of the modern day’s multimedia and interactive aspects of websites eating up the minuscule amounts of storage and bandwidth that GeoCities offered. It will be a sad day nonetheless, as the once popular web host of our youth ceases to exist.
The company earlier announced in April that it would be closing the GeoCities service, promising to share more details in the summer.
Yahoo acquired the business in the late 1990’s for $3.6, when scrolling HTML marquees were still considered cool (ha!). The service was one of the most popular free web hosting services in the late 90s through the early 2000’s.
The service gradually faded in popularity with the emergence of social media services such as Flickr and Facebook.
In Yahoo’s Help section, the company explains why it is terminating the service and suggests current GeoCities users to migrate to its Yahoo Web Hosting service.
In effort to save the former pages hosted on GeoCities, Jason Scott’s Archive Team has migrate sites, archiving more than 200,000 Geocities websites.