# GeoCities to shut down for the weekend (longer?)



## John Corn (Mar 21, 2002)

_Yahoo's Web publishing community GeoCities will undergo a planned outage over the weekend, an uncharacteristic move given the Internet's round-the-clock nature.

The downtime will affect GeoCities' free members and its GeoCities Plus members who pay $4.95 a month. More advanced GeoCities services that cost more money, such as Pro, Webmaster and Advantage, will not be affected.

The planned downtime stems from the company's decision to move GeoCities' servers to Sprint's Web hosting services. GeoCities, like other parts of Yahoo, previously used Cable & Wireless' Exodus to host its operations. As a result of the move, GeoCities will be down beginning Friday at 9 p.m. PDT and will be restored on the morning of Sunday, May 19.

"We're moving the GeoCities servers to Sprint--which is why we'll be down for that period of time," said Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako.

Osako said the decision to move to Sprint was part of an "ongoing effort to strengthen the diversification and redundancy of our network." She added that scheduled downtimes will not be a commonplace occurrence for GeoCities users.

Yahoo and Sprint announced their Web hosting arrangement in January.

Yahoo has used Exodus to host its services for years. But a year ago, Yahoo suffered a series of service outages after an explosion in one of its Sunnyvale, Calif.-based data centers cut off its power supply. Yahoo is also headquartered in Sunnyvale.

Osako said Yahoo will continue using Exodus for hosting services.

Shutting down a service for over 24 hours is a rarity these days, especially on a heavily used service such as GeoCities. Message boards have not shown any indication of protest over the move, most likely because Yahoo had posted notices to members prior to the downtime. As of April, GeoCites had 31.6 million unique visitors in the United States, according to Jupiter Media Metrix.

Like many other services on Yahoo, GeoCities has been moving toward subscription fees as part of a companywide effort to diversify revenue. In March, Yahoo forced GeoCites members to begin paying monthly fees to use FTP (file transfer protocol) and higher bandwidth services. The free offering is more limited and requires users to accept banner ads._

Oh no! All the teenage "*~*AbOuT ME*~*" websites will be down! What a shame.. 
I understand they're moving .. but what are they benefiting from this? Doesn't make sense to me completely


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## MarkA (Mar 23, 2002)

Oh well, my "teenage "*~*AbOuT ME*~*"" site won't go down as I'm hosting on TruePath I need to finish that site one of these days, it's a project I started and just kinda stopped half-finished.


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## Steve Mehs (Mar 21, 2002)

Some of those about me pages were so increadably stupid. A few years ago I spent a day and went thought about 75 about me sites. Okay, I was really board and this was before I was into DBS/HT. Yahoo shpuld put more time and effort into other places instead of Geocities.


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## Adam Richey (Mar 25, 2002)

Geocities has a LOT of good websites, but their are at least as many crappy websites. I host my website on Geocities, and I know it's far from perfect, but it's still a VERY reliable and info-packed website.

SHAMELESS PLUG:
http://www.geocities.com/dishcustomer/Dish.html


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## Steve Mehs (Mar 21, 2002)

Orge, your website is the most informative Geocities site Ive seen. It has useful information and real content. I noticed most of the about me sites seem to indirectly say 'Im so cool that I created a website'


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## John Corn (Mar 21, 2002)

Not a shameless plug Ogre, thats a very good site, informative, I like it alot......you should plug it more often. 
You done a wonderful job. :righton:


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## MarkA (Mar 23, 2002)

Put it in your sig like I do


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## Adam Richey (Mar 25, 2002)

That sounds like a PERFECT idea. Thanks guys.


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## MarkA (Mar 23, 2002)

You're welcome


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## John Corn (Mar 21, 2002)

Everytime I see your post Ogre, I keep thinking you need a avatar of Shrek, that would be cool.:lol:


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## MarkA (Mar 23, 2002)

That would be a cool avatar Ogre, go for it!!!!


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## Adam Richey (Mar 25, 2002)

LOL. Shrek is one of my nicknames. I've got several.

Ogre, Grotto, Shrek, Uncle ADER (initials), Uncle Ogre

Can anybody tell me where I can get a Shrek avatar? LOL


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## John Corn (Mar 21, 2002)

I found an avatar....hang on, I'll add it now.


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## Steve Mehs (Mar 21, 2002)

Look Great!


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## Adam Richey (Mar 25, 2002)

It's a shame NameZero has started charging toi get domain names cuz I could have registered an actual dot com name, but they now make you pay. I know it was free before. Are there ANY sites left out there that will give you a domain name?


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