Yahoo! is shutting down GeoCities, it’s free web-hosting service. Yahoo said about it’s plan to shut down GeoCities on Thursday. Though no fixed date announced, Yahoo mentioned on it’s website that the service will be shut down later this year. More details about closing GeoCities and how users can save their data will be provided this summer.
GeoCities was founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994. Initially it was named Beverly Hills Internet (BHI). When the company decided to focus on building membership and community, and on December 15, 1995, BHI became known as GeoCities after having also been called Geopages. The company went public in August 1998, listing on the NASDAQ exchange with the code GCTY. The IPO price was $17, rising rapidly after launch to a peak of over $100. In January 1999, near the peak of the dot com bubble, Yahoo! purchased GeoCities for $3.57 billion.
Starting the shut down procees, Yahoo! has stopped offering new GeoCities accounts and now it’s front page says “Sorry, new GeoCities accounts are no longer available.” On the GeoCities help page, Yahoo added:
“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.”
Yahoo encourages interested GeoCities users to switch to Yahoo! Web Hosting service, a full-featured web hosting plan which includes a personalized domain name, matching email, new site building tools, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, premium customer support, and more.