I have a Geocities home page like a lot of people; I haven’t updated it in a while, but I like the page and I don’t want it to disappear. Is this what’s going to happen when Geocities officially closes? Am I still going to be able to update the page? I really like Geocities’ Pagebuilder tool, even though it’s very simple and limited; it suits my purposes just fine. Is a similar service going to be offered by Yahoo? Are the pages going to transfer over to a Yahoo host or something? What do I do?
FAQ, in case you were not directed there: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/close/index.html
Looks like, if you upgrade to Yahoo! Web Hosting before 26 October, your old address will be redirected to a new domain that you can set up there. The content on your Geocities site will be inaccessible after Geocities closes - i.e. you should have downloaded everything on your site to your local PC by then, or risk losing it for good. If you are a Geocities Plus customer (looks like that’s been a premium version of the service) they seem to offer to move your content for you.
Personally I’d advise against moving to another free hosting service - better to take the plunge and move to a regular web site on a domain you own yourself. All the free hosts that I have used since 1995 have since closed down (Compuserve, AOL, T-Online) - a long-established URL is a real asset but on a free hosting server it will at some point fall victim to some PHB.
You page will cease to exist on the 26th if you have a free page, so no, you won’t be able to update it; you won’t even be able to see it anymore. If you have a paid page like mine, it will become a yahoo page on October 26th, and when you log in for the first time after that you’ll be told to pick a domain name.
Saving a geocities free page is a huge pain in the butt because unlike every other webpage, nearly, you can’t go to each page and save it from file/save - the content simply won’t show up when you open the page you saved. So, my suggestion is that if you want to save the site so you can move your it to another free page, you mirror it now with WinHTTrack (this is what I’m doing with the old free page I had before upgrading to a paid one). You need to change the download rate to no more than 999kb so you won’t go over the transfer limit on your geocities page. How to do that is shown in this person’s blog. Fair warning: it takes a long time to save this way because it will save all the pages you linked to as well. So far it’s taken 24 hours to save my site and counting, because it’s mirroring my paid site too. The sooner you start, the better your odds of getting everything will be.
Why is Geocities being closed? It costs what, all of $100 a month for Yahoo to host those simple pages on modern servers? It must be some sort of conspiracy… Possibly concerning blogs and clouds teaming up to kill their father so they can sleep with their mother and not have to cry at night anymore. Right?
>Why is Geocities being closed? It costs what, all of $100 a month for Yahoo to host those simple pages on modern servers?
Heh. 100 dollars is what is costs to replace one drive. According to the wikipedia the business lost 8 million dollars in 1998 and has yet to be profitable and has 11 million unique visitors a month.
I dont know the specifics but my WAG is that this stuff takes up a good part of a datacenter and uses the bandwidth of a couple OC3s 24/7, easy. Probably a couple million a year to just keep alive. I would be surprised to hear it costs them at least 5 or 6 million a year. This is resources and money better spent on more successful yahoo ventures like mail or flickr.
Would love to find out the numbers. And what profit does flickr bring in, exactly?
This saddens me. It’s like watching someone take a stump grinder to the old oak tree.
Simple - the free hosting service is competition for their paid hosting service.
And the unprofitable bit mentioned above counts for something too.
I’m betting they will lose a lot more in ad revenue on GeoCities than they gain in new Yahoo! Web! Hosting! customers.
If Geocities doesn’t produce enough ad revenue to pay for itself I fail to see why losing absolute revenue would be a problem.
I am sad, though- although I took my GeoCities site down years ago because of some, um, stuff on it of questionable legality.
I don’t want to sound like a net-snob (because I don’t really have the skills or ability with code or networking knowledge to even come close to qualifying, even though I’m a long-term webizen (since 1997 at least)) but I’m as surprised to hear that Geocities was still active as I would be to hear that Angelfire was still active. I thought both of them had shut down ages ago.