Why is GeoCities not accepting new customers?
We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways. We will be closing GeoCities later this year.
I'm a GeoCities customer. What's happening to my site?
Existing GeoCities accounts have not changed. You can continue to enjoy your web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don't need to change a thing right now — we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We'll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time.
It's probably not newsworthy for most people but it caught my attention as my original NBA Live site (the one I ran before I took the NLSC job) was hosted at GeoCities as were a lot of community websites back in the day, with several ups and downs along the way. Bandwidth limits and restrictions on remote linking certainly killed its popularity as a free host and from what I understand they made a few changes which made it less desirable not too long after I no longer had any dealings with them.
In any case I'm kind of sorry to see it go as for a while there it was the place where you'd host a site or page. It's not that surprising though, especially when basic paid hosting with domain names and all is so much cheaper these days. It was definitely handy for a while there and I certainly made good use of it for a few years. The funny thing is it's been rumoured to close pretty much ever since Yahoo! bought it and there was a widespread panic about it about eight years ago. Finally, the rumours are true.
