Before the popularity of the social networking website, Geocities has been a popular webhost for people who like to make personal websites. It was founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner named as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI). At that time Geocities (BHI) was a small webhost and development company but in 1995 they decided to offer free home pages to users.
The site then is divided into neighbourhoods such as “Silicon Valley”, “Sunset Strip”, “Beverly Hills” and 11 more neighbourhoods. It was also that year that BHI change their name into Geocities and almost a thousand users sign up each day. Their monthly page views reach six millions thus making the management change its focus into building membership and community. Since it become such a successful venture Yahoo decided to purchase it for $3.57 billion in January 1999.
This acquisition prove to be a bad move since many homesteaders or web page owners decided to transfer to other competing hosting companies. Furthermore, in that year Yahoo decided to neighbourhoods and cities changing it to “vanity urls” like http://geocities.com/yourname.
However, first time website owners usually go to Geocities and avail their services because it is so easy and free. Besides if you already have a Yahoo ID you can also join just go to their site and enter your Yahoo ID and answer some questions. During registration you will be given your very own subdomain name (e.g. http://www.geocities.com/yourname) for your usage. However, the webspace and bandwidth are limited if you avail of the free package but if you need additional space you can always purchase additional space and bandwidth for as low as $5 a month.
The advantages of hosting your website in Geocities are:
- free website templates
- easy to use webpage editor
- cool ad ons
- 15MB storage and 3GB bandwidth
Plus having your own website gives you the freedom on what topic to write, graphics to put and become your own boss. The only restriction you will have in this kind of set-up is the terms of service of Yahoo Geocities.
Official Website: http://geocities.com
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