When we sign up to a broadband account, many of received free space to put up a basic homepage. Indeed, there are many web providers in the market that will offer you free space to design your first site. Even designing your first commercial space, with a domain, can be relatively low cost. Back in the 90s GeoCities where one of the first companies to offer a web hosting service and enabled people to create their own local 'city' or community.

In all fairness, the domains they used to give were rather obscure, long-winded and almost impossible to remember. Worse, the the page designs weren't good. However, people still used them and they were popular as local homepages. Hard to believe, but Yahoo bought GeoCities for over $3 billion (yes, billion) in 1999 - ten years ago.

Now the service is going to close so anyone with an existing GeoCities account will have to move the service to another hosting service, such as the paid-for Yahoo hosting service.

24 Apr 2009