Yahoo's Geocities hosting is closing
Back in 1999 I started my first attempt at a website as an assignment for the HTML authoring class I took at Evergreen Valley College in the Bay Area.
Since then, until 2004 many of the sites I created where hosted on geocities. The hosting had a long annoying vertical banner ad, only 15 Megabytes for files, and such limited bandwidth allowance that in those days before youTube, as soon as couple of people downloaded a video from the site, the bandwidth limit would be reached and geocities would shut down the site for 24 hours.
Despite that, one good thing it had ,was that it was highly reliable. Comparatively other hostings had a lot of down time. There were also menay small companies giving it a try at web site hosting, that would close within 6 months. So it wasn't so bad to be on geocities. Also a site on geocities would rank really high on Google searches.
Even though I stopped using geocities by 2004, I have many sites from that period and before that are still hosted there. They are sites that did not require updates, for example the one's I had for artists whose career ended a while back and don't require updates like: Lime, Dusty ,... etc. Or my own personal pictures that didn't need updates..
My hope was that archive.org or the internet way back machine would save a copy of the sites. However, that doesnt seam to save the old sites properly. The images are not saved, and it looks like it doesnt save beyond the front-page of the site.
Personally geocities closing is a big nuisance. Instead of putting my time in new updates, I have to put time in saving some of the material I had uploaded in the space of 6 years in geocities.
The guys at yahoo are extremely rude as well. No bulk downloading to save the files, no free redirecting either.
Couple of months ago Google announced it would close their original attempt at web site hosting. Causing lot of problems for me, which are not completely solved yet and will take a long time to fix.
The desappearnce of geocities sites is a big cultural loss to everyone, because lot of the vintage sites on the internet dating back to the late 90's were hosted on geocities as it was one of the only free hosting options that were available back then.
