24 April 2009 | Author: O. Gaywood Media Optimiser

Geocities service to close

Yahoo! has announced that its Geocities web hosting service is to close after 14 years of providing a free and easy way for web users to have their own online voice.

Known to almost every internet user, Geocities has a warm place in the hearts of many. Yahoo! bought the service in 1999 for $4.6billion. Geocities.com continued to grow each year and attracted almost 180m visitors in 2008 with more than 12million unique visitors last month. However, Yahoo! has now stopped accepting new registrations and has said, rather vaguely, that all current sites will be shut down sometime later this year.

A statement on the Geocities site says: "After careful consideration, we have decided to close GeoCities later this year. We'll share more details this summer. For now, please sign in or visit the help center for more information."

Geocities has been free since its inception and Yahoo! has no plans to replace it with another free hosting service. It has, however, had its detractors since Yahoo!'s takeover including critics of its long and complicated method of creating URLs as well as it becoming a hub for poor design and websites with a high number of gif animations. In recent times it has also seen fierce competition for other free blogging sites.

For those with a site on Geocities, Yahoo! has said that they will release more details in the summer about how to save data.

Since Carol Bartz took over as the company's CEO in January the company has dropped a number of services, including the Briefcase online storage system and the Fare Chase travel search engine, in an attempt to rectify its ailing profit line

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