Geocities was founded in 1994 as the primary free web site hosts on the Internet.  It was founded by John Rezner and David Bohnett and started out by users selecting cities that featured the type of topics they were creating sites about.  For example, if your focus was on technology, your web site would be found in Silicon Valley.  Another example is if you were creating an entertainment web site, it would be found in Hollywood.  Geocities sites still around from the beginning utilize the old categories but newer sites do not.

At the end of April 2009, Yahoo who had acquired Geocities announced it would be shutting down the service at the end of the year.  No new Geocities pages can be created, even for registered Yahoo users.  However, all web sites under the Geocities banner would still be operational and hosted until the end of 2009.  Yahoo did this to help promote their paid web hosting services and eliminate the plethora of unused Geocities web sites floating around on servers.

Yahoo no longer offers any sort of free web hosting service. For users who chose to upgrade to a paid account through Yahoo, very little has to be done besides pay for the service. Other users who choose to go elsewhere have to find a new service, reupload there content and possibly even lose some visitors who can no longer find their new web site. Finding a web host is never easy, especially after being with Geocities for years or even the beginning.

Many popular web hosts, such as Dreamhost, offered discount deals to gain Geocities users. These deals offered some of the cheapest and most sought off web hosting prices in history but they were only for those displaced by Yahoo's announcement. Luckily for those in a bind, Yahoo announced the closure with enough time for everyone interested to find permanent hosting elsewhere. Just make sure if you have a Geocities account you take advantage of deals out there and move your web site before it is too late.