Saturday, December 3, 2011

Remember Geocities?

Those of you who were online since the 90s should have known Geocities.com quite well.It was the largest free hosting provider then.It was started in 1994 and shut down on 26 October 2009.
It introduced the Cyber Cities concept where members could select which neighbourhood to host his website.Somewhat similar to the Categories of modern portal websites.Everyone flocked to Geocities, brushing up their web building skills and uploaded contents of all sorts, some are serious academic and cultural stuff while a lot were pure garbage.
I had a few websites too. Since I was the owner of an active MIRC channel, I created one site for channel members to interact. I had a personal homepage, in which I put photo of my 2 children, from they were babies to their first day in school, Parents' Day, Prize Giving day. I wrote articles about their progress and their health.
When chatting on the net, I always urged people to check out my sites and reminded them, "don't forget to sign on my guest book!" LOL
Beside Geocities, there were other free hosting websites like AngelFire, Tripod.They were less popular. I later started using paid hosting services when I became serious on internet marketing. Since I had no intention to monetize my geocities websites, so I let them remain there. Once in a while I would visit my old personal site to look at the old photos in there, it brought back sweet memories.
Geocities was later acquired by Yahoo to boost its own failing hosting business. But it did NOT work out as expected, so Yahoo shut down Geocities.I found this out one day when I tried to access my website but was informed that geocities was shut down. I was furious! I was not given time to retrieve my data. I wish someone will buy over Yahoo one day, and shut it down the same way it did to others. That will be sweet revenge on my behalf and on many others' behalf! I always advise those who are keen on running their own online business, use only paid hosting services. Avoid big names like Yahoo, they may change their policy over night and won't give a damn to your benefits.

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