The end of Geocities
October 26th, 2009 by Andreas from Xavier Media® in Ecommerce, Miscellaneous, The World According to Xavier, Web Hosting. Topics: exavier, Geocities, Hosting, YahooToday is the last day of the history of Geocities since Yahoo has decided to close down the Geocities hosting.
Geocites started offering free homepages to the Internet community in 1994 as one of the first companies in that business sector. It pretty soon became one of the largest and most popular sites on the Internet thanks to it's innovative way of allowing people (and small companies) to create free home pages using a web based editor.It became possible for anyone without technical knowledge to create a simple site 
In 1999 the company was acquired by Yahoo for $2.87 billions and the popularity began to disapper. In April this year Yahoo announced that it was no longer possible to create new accounts and the users should find new hosts for the web pages.
If you consider the amount Yahoo paid for Geocities it can't have been a good deal for Yahoo. They should have let Geocites operate more on it's own and should also have developed their services instead of just using their old platform from 1999 with just a face-lift. Since Geocities stopped developing they really lost the race compared to paid web hosting deals like for example our own eXavier.com where you can get a web site with tons of features not included in Geocities for only $3.95/month.
The lesson to learn here is that if you buy a site (small or big) you have to develop it even after the acqusition, otherwise you may lose your entire investment.
About the authorAndreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.
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