Yahoo's GeoCities Shutting Down

[gpraceman]

First it was AOL's Hometown free web hosting, now Yahoo's GeoCities is shutting down. Oct 26 is the date. http://geocities.yahoo.com/

Many websites relating to Pinewood Derby type racing, pack sites and so on will have the plug pulled on them. Hopefully, site owners will find a new home for their sites, but I bet many of them have just been abandoned. Several of these sites were ones that I learned a lot from when diving into this sport.

[sporty]

I recall when zdnet had a awesome free website. then 1 year later they wanted $100 a year for it.

seems the internet is becoming not so free anymore.

Sporty

[andylester]

http://www.weebly.com" target="_blank is free as far as I know. Even when I paid for it, it was cheap like $3.00 a month. You can make your site online and it is so easy, a caveman like me can use it with ease!

[Stan Pope]

I've concluded that if I want continuity in my "window from the world", I must control the "naming of my site". I can not allow the supplier to dictate contents of the URI, such as the "users.aol.com" portion for an AOL hosted site. Such formats (XOOM, GeoCities, AOL, et.al.) are not portable ... I can't take them to another provider.

It has taken most of a year to get the search engines updated to point to "www.stanpope.net" from "users.aol.com/standcmr". Even now, I'm not sure that I've nailed 'em all. But a worse problem is the hundreds (thousands?) of links from other websites that still point to my defunct AOL site! I can write only so many emails asking for those links to be updated!

At this time, it costs between $100 and $150 per year to get more than enough space and bandwidth to serve the present users of "stanpope.net" (as well as email service!) That is a reasonable expense for a "hobby." If I were a golfer, I'm sure that I'd blow through much more in memberships and/or greens fees each year, not to mention the cost of some latest/greatest doohickies in my golf bag! And, if my current provider goes "casters up", I can contract with another provider to host the stanpope.net URI so that links and search databases don't change. With a bit of luck, few would even notice that the host changed, although some may be held up for a day or so while the internet naming services got the change propagated through the system.

Do the "free services" have a place? Yes, for learning. But once serious deployment starts, "get portable."

On the subject of "free services", recent entries include "twitter" and "facebook". Approaching these as another "search engine" to help steer traffic to one's main (portable) site should be okay, but I'd not put a lot of effort or $s into functionality that is bound to either "free service". Nor would I tie my "success" (by whatever definition one chooses) to either of these services.