Source: James (Poc Network)
It looks like the days of “free webhosting” is coming to an end. In the early to mid 90′s, free web hosts such as GeoCities experienced a popular boom as millions of users took advantage of their services. They allowed anyone to be able to create their own little website without having to pay a dime. This was mostly popular among the younger community who couldn’t afford to pay for hosting (or in some cases weren’t even old enough to have a job).
As the years continued, free hosts have been losing popularity due to the lack of features for today’s languages and technologies, limitations of monthly bandwidth/transfer, as well as excessive on-page required advertising (that’s what makes it free). Most business’ chose not to host their websites on such hosts as it would reflect an unprofessional image onto their viewers, and the younger community got sucked up by services such as MySpace or Facebook. Now free hosts are becoming a thing of the past.
Yahoo has announced that they will be closing the doors to GeoCities, whom they had aquired back in 1999 when it was making billions of dollars in ad revenue, and hosted millions of registered users.
A posting on a Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) Help page for GeoCities on Thursday said the service was no longer accepting new customers and that it will be closing later this year, with more details about how individuals can save their data coming this summer.” (Internet News)
This move was part of Yahoo’s CEO, Carol Bartz’s, plan to recharge Yahoo’s growth in the competitive and financially challenged economy. Yahoo had just recently announced that they would be laying off 5% of their workforce.
TweetYahoo stated: “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,”