Yahoo deletes GeoCities today

Author: Gareth Halfacree
Published: 26th October 2009
Comments (27) Stumble
Yahoo deletes GeoCities today

Yahoo is today carrying through on its promise to close self-hosting site Geocities, with around 10 terabytes of data being deleted.

Today marks the end of an era, with Yahoo finally shutting the doors of its popular GeoCities web hosting service for good and ending its fifteen year run.

As reported over on ComputerWorld, the popular free webhost - founded back in 1994 - was one of the most common destinations in the early days of the Web, with records showing it was the third most visited domain in the world.

For many the service represented their first attempts at actually creating a piece of the Web rather than just consuming it passively, and while the appearance of many of the sites - often featuring looped MIDI tracks as background music and a plethora of animated GIFs - would seem crude now, it was an important milestone in the history of self publishing on the Internet.

Yahoo, having struggled to turn a profit with the service and not wishing to compete with the massive quantity of alternative services that either offer simpler webhosting or a far more powerful content management system, closed the site's doors to new users in April this year - but has now made the decision to completely shut the service down and delete all content.

That means that all data currently stored on GeoCities - that's thought to be around ten terabytes - will disappear permanently today. While third parties such as the Archive Team have run projects to rescue as much of the data as possible, it's quite likely that a lot of sites will be gone for good.

Did you ever host a site on GeoCities, or are you glad to see the service go? Does the thought of a historical snapshot of old sites fill you with nostalgia, or should the Archive Team be concentrating their efforts elsewhere? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
Quote Krikkit 26th October 2009, 10:32
Anyone seen xkcd today? A perfect example.

Part of me thinks it should be preserved, just for posterity. What's 10TB today? Set up a cheap web portal to browse through it, leave it as a marker on the history of the interwebs.
Quote cjoyce1980 26th October 2009, 10:37
it was still going...........???
Quote proxess 26th October 2009, 10:45
Quote:
Originally Posted by Krikkit
Part of me thinks it should be preserved, just for posterity. What's 10TB today? Set up a cheap web portal to browse through it, leave it as a marker on the history of the interwebs.

+1
Quote wiak 26th October 2009, 10:48
thats just 5 x 2TB harddrives :P
Quote Mankz 26th October 2009, 10:53
http://www.webhamster.com/

Ahhh... good times.
Quote roblikesbeer 26th October 2009, 11:07
My first webshite was a geocities, complete with animated gifs and background music!

Just had a browse for it, but it's disappeared off the face of t'internet which is probably for the best...
Quote AshT 26th October 2009, 11:14
It's a real shame. Can't something be done to save it all?
Quote mi1ez 26th October 2009, 11:19
I have to agree with some of the comments. It's only 10TB?!
Quote BLC 26th October 2009, 11:27
Quote:
Originally Posted by roblikesbeer
My first webshite was a geocities, complete with animated gifs and background music!

Just had a browse for it, but it's disappeared off the face of t'internet which is probably for the best...

Indeed, I remember the days of setting up crappy websites on Geoshitties... :) IIRC, we posted our first school website on Geocities and coded all the HTML by hand in notepad... Those were the days... :)

I think it should be preserved for posterity; many people (myself included) have hard drives in their home machines that are at least 1TB, so it's not exactly that hard, or expensive, to find ample storage space these days...
Quote Paradigm Shifter 26th October 2009, 11:33
Yeah, if it's only 10TB (hard to see how it could be more, given how space-restrictive they were) I don't see the point in deleting it all. I still remember uploading my site by command-line FTP, after hand-writing the HTML. :D
Quote tripwired 26th October 2009, 12:33
Quote:
Originally Posted by Krikkit
Anyone seen xkcd today? A perfect example.

lol, brilliant.
Quote quack 26th October 2009, 12:41
Surprised Geocities has lasted this long tbh, it's sad to see a big part of internet history just wiped out like this, although really what's being lost? Does anyone actually use Geocities for anything important?
Quote ano 26th October 2009, 13:57
The Internet Archive has been working to store it:

http://www.archive.org/web/geocities.php
Quote Ghys 26th October 2009, 14:05
crap, mine has disappeared !

oh and xkcd is the WIN of the day !
Quote infi 26th October 2009, 14:19
I created my first website ever on geocities in 1998 hosting unreal maps, prefabs and tutorials for mapping.
unfortunately I lost track of it and never found it again, didn't know if they deleted it before or not.
Quote roblikesbeer 26th October 2009, 14:23
Quote:
Originally Posted by Krikkit
Anyone seen xkcd today? A perfect example.

Oh wow, that is solid gold win!
Quote SMIFFYDUDE 26th October 2009, 14:53
I thought they got rid of it years ago, guess not. RIP geocities.com/plehmeh
Quote tk421 26th October 2009, 15:23
in related news: the intarwebs suddenly became 42% less ugly, and java-based flash-y logos and mouse trailers went from high risk to practically extinct ...
Quote Comet 26th October 2009, 15:44
sniff. there go my teen days websites.
Quote Imperium 26th October 2009, 21:41
I just realised that there's kids on the WWW who are younger than Geocities.

Great xkcd tribute though.

Rest in peace, the .gif e-mail button!
http://www.wilsoninfo.com/animati/email_13_animated.gif

And goodbye, extremely badly coded mess of tributes to bad bands!
Quote Star*Dagger 26th October 2009, 21:51
Quote:
Originally Posted by roblikesbeer
My first webshite was a geocities, complete with animated gifs and background music!

Just had a browse for it, but it's disappeared off the face of t'internet which is probably for the best...

This is why i am happy it is gone, too many poorly designed sites. On the other hand I do agree it should be backed up. I have 10TB here on my desk!

Yours in Preservation Plasma,
Star*Dagger
Quote Star*Dagger 26th October 2009, 21:53
Oh jeez, i hope no porn was lost in this!!!!!!!
Quote supermonkey 27th October 2009, 01:21
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mankz
http://www.webhamster.com/

Ahhh... good times.
+1. I was reading the news to my wife, and when I mentioned the words "looped midi background music" and "animated gifs" she immediately started singing the Hamster Dance song.

Useless bit of trivia: The Hamster Dance music is the the first part of the intro to Disney's animated feature, Robin Hood. The first few times I heard it it drove me crazy. I knew the rhythm was too familiar, then it finally hit me as I hummed it the rest of the day.

I fondly remember my first web page on Geocities. It was horrible. Like everyone else, my page was nothing more than an About Me list with a table full of links to other sites that were actually useful. And I'm not ashamed to admit that I made far too much use of the star field background.

-monkey
Quote The_Beast 27th October 2009, 03:10
GeoCities?
Quote null_x86 27th October 2009, 10:35
Quote:
Originally Posted by Krikkit
Anyone seen xkcd today? A perfect example.

Part of me thinks it should be preserved, just for posterity. What's 10TB today? Set up a cheap web portal to browse through it, leave it as a marker on the history of the interwebs.

QFT. It should be archived so we can still have it as memories :D
Quote JrRRr 28th October 2009, 19:22
Jupp.. My fist homepage was at geocities, and web.archive.org actually saved my front page. Although without the cool background and fascinating animated gifs!

I think it should be part of "Museum of Internet" since they do that with kitchen-furniture from the '70! Not a bad comparison if I'll say so myself..:D
Quote roblikesbeer 28th October 2009, 21:09
Quote:
Originally Posted by JrRRr
Jupp.. My fist homepage was at geocities, and web.archive.org actually saved my front page. Although without the cool background and fascinating animated gifs!

Wow... last updated in September '97!
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