Geocities, a free webhosting company owned by Yahoo! closes its doors to new account registrations, and total shutdown coming later this year:
Existing GeoCities accounts have not changed. You can continue to enjoy your web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don’t need to change a thing right now — we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time. [Yahoo!]
I started building my website at geocities before moving to a paid hosting account and a great blogging engine called “WordPress”. The original site is still up and you can check it out here. For purposes of nostalgia, here’s the screenshot:
Back then, geocities was the way to go if you want to just setup your own website for free. Paid hosting, even when shared, is nowhere cheap, unlike now. You can host html documents only at geocities, no PHP, no MySQL whatsoever, just static html pages.
To Geocities, here’s a toast to your bitter end. You will always be remembered.