During your entire online life, you have probably visited a Geocities hosted website at least a dozen times. For those small hints and tips, to whole guides on complex science, Geocities hosted it all.

Yahoo! HQ

There’s been a rise in the amount of ISP website hosts shutting down recently – Geocities is probably the most recent. Freeserve, Wanadoo and Orange all got rid of their services a couple of months ago, and hundreds, potentially thousands, of websites have been banished to the depths of server disk drives, purely because it’s too costly to keep a few users happy.

There will be some users who take advantage of the ‘discounted’ upgrade packages which will ensure data is kept, but in all likelihood these packages are more costly than better packages available elsewhere.

The announcements scare novice users into purchasing extravagant packages that simply aren’t needed for them, and I’m sure they will get little support from Yahoo! in this case.

You may also be interested in...

• Yahoo! Begins Massive HomePage Makeover
• Premium App Store Coming to the iPhone?
• Just Where Did Blogger Go Wrong?
• Search Giant Google Turns 11
• Website report finds M&S and W H Smith are most user friendly