Way way way back when Geocities existed, I set up the website I use for my comedy music.
Someone advised me to use Geocities not because it was the super best most awesome, but because I was web design illiterate and the advice I was given was that Geocities was set up in a way that was easy for people who had no idea what they were doing. There was a free option, so I tried that and when I felt like I had the hang of it I upgraded.
Years go by, kids these days have never heard of a Geocities, Yahoo happily takes my monthly payments from me directly and has done so ever since Geocities died a quiet unmourned unnoticed death.
The comedy music is no longer what I’m doing as my primary creative pursuit, but it is not something I have abandoned so I still want to have the website. However, at this moment I am not doing anything with it. Another creative project has taken all my focus for the past couple years and it is this other project that will be my entire focus for at least another year and a half.
If I am going to do nothing to promote the website and
The website does not naturally attract any traffic on its own but
I still want to keep it so I can use it again in the future (and in the meantime I want something to still exist at that address) …
What is the best thing for me to do?
I currently pay $12.95 a month for a website that has not been updated or used or looked at for the past two years.
Is it your own domain or a Yahoo/geocities subdomain (I honestly can’t remember if the former was an option).
If it’s your own domain, you could park it cheaply, maybe redirect it to somewhere that the content can be hosted cheap or for free (like a Facebook page even)
Not complex at all, and I’m thinking I’m going to gut it all leaving nothing but a home page with links to where to buy the CDs and a link to the Facebook page. So, once it’s gutted there will be about as little complexity as a website could possibly have.
I am interested in this too. I also have a simple website hosted by Yahoo that I would like to move to a cheaper host (preferably a host in the UK,that I can pay in £ rather than $), but I am not sure how to go about it. My site was never on Geocities, but, although the domain is registered in my name, I bought and continue to pay for the domain, as well as the hosting, through Yahoo.
There is a moderate amount of data at the site, and it does get a small amount of traffic, which I hope will continue, but it does not rely on CGI scripts or anything like that, just a little client-side javascript, so it only needs simple hosting.
Nearly every host will offer to move any site to their servers free if you supply the FTP passwords. ( And any application specific passwords, like WordPress. )
Sometimes they can’t, this happened to me because Dreamhost ( who are brilliant by the way ) uses it’s own very specific hosting panel, but they refunded the money. [ I was hoping to move to a dedicated server rather than shared hosting, and Dreamhost is expensive for dedicated stuff. ]
If you want to do it manually, just buy the hosting and FTP up the same files to the new site, X; then at your domain-sellers, point the site to the DNS of the new site X. Or get them to. All you need are the Name Servers of your new host, which the latter will supply.
Never let the domain name be held by the hosts. I do in one instance, but it’s a forum and thus in danger of hi-jacking.
NearlyFreeSpeech.net was made for this sort of thing. It’s billed by usage, rather than a flat monthly fee, and you can pay only pennies per month for a low-traffic personal site.
When I used it for something similar, it cost me $10/year for the domain and about 30 cents a month for the website itself.
IMHO $12.95/mo is way too much to pay for a site you don’t get any use out of. Especially if you are looking to switch to just a single page with links.
Never heard of Reply’s suggestion but that sounds perfect!
For what it’s worth, they’ve been around for more than a decade (since 2002). Their main drawback is that they don’t provide an easy way to grow your site – any site with medium traffic is probably better off with Dreamhost, etc. – but for tiiiiiiiiiiny sites, they’re perfect.
Oh, it’s hardly your fault. They don’t much marketing and are barely known outside of fringy techno-liberal-anti-censorship-etc. crowds. They come up on Slashdot once in a blue moon, but that’s about it.
For bienville’s purposes (not mine), Neocities might work. They provide free hosting for small sites in much the same same way that Geocities used to. I think you can have your own domain name.
