GeoCities Closing Marks the End of Free Web Hosting for Many

October 26th, 2009, will mark the end of an era in free Internet web hosting for the users of the popular GeoCities service.

In the 1990's, before MySpace, Facebook and the era of social networking, GeoCities was a giant in the arena of free self-expression on the Internet. GeoCities was founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner as BHI, or Beverly Hills Internet in 1994 and offered free web pages to its users as early as 1995. Content was categorized in the web directory style according to "Neighbourhoods" where one could find material that was thematically related. In 1999 it was purchased by Yahoo! for $3.57 billion in stock, bringing with it new terms of service, which prompted many of the original users to leave in large numbers. Further changes by Yahoo! limited the effectiveness of the web hosting for account holders, when they offered a premium paid service in 2001, while limiting the monthly data transfer for the free service. Now in 2009, according to Yahoo!, they have decided to help users;

explore and build relationships online in other ways

What this means is that they are recommending that account holders upgrade to the premium paid service, at a cost of around $4.99 US per month for the first year and $9.99 in future years. Rupert Goodwins, editor of ZDNet, told the BBC;

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

Although it's not really discussed in Yahoo!'s own literature, a number of factors could have contributed to the closing of GeoCities. According to this report by TechCombo, which was written back in April, when Yahoo! first announced that they would be closing the web hosting service, Comscore Media Matrix reports indicate that it went from being the third largest site behind AOL and Yahoo! itself, when it was bought in 1999, down to only 177 million visitors in 2008. It's also a sign of the rapidly growing and constantly changing face of the Internet, with social networking websites allowing denizens of the Internet to find other ways of putting their content out there, not to mention the fact that there are other free web hosting sites available out there, some of whom are taking advantage of the potential for new account holders, such as uCoz, Jimdo or Lunarpages. GeoCities will not be missed by all, but one group of Wikipedia contributors known as WikiProject Oregon is trying to be pro-active and made some interesting points about the potential loss of resources that will no longer be available saying:

The history community is going to lose a lot of original research in many areas including fan communities, sports, military, women’s studies and more.

For the nostalgic web browser in you, Archive.org has cached copies of the original GeoCities homepage going back as far as October 1996 through the first few years that it was owned by Yahoo!. If you want to see what this page really looked like back then, try changing your screen resolution to 640x480, unless of course you feel that it's time to move on, as the Internet and all of its facets will surely continue to do so.