GeoCities

March 11, 2002 9:11 AM

GeoCities was once the darling of the online world to every-man wanted to post his own web site. Free space for all, and all were happy. Then Yahoo! bought it, and the dot-com collapse occurred. Now, GeoCities offers new premium packages, offering more features. But at $19.95 before you can even having scripting, traditional web hosts greatly undercut Yahoo!'s offering, and offer more in terms of features still.
posted by benjh (13 comments total)

So will people search out traditional web hosts, and get full support; or will they blindly shell out bucks to Yahoo! for features they could get elsewhere much cheaper.

$20 now gets you PHP support, but I can get that elsewhere, and cheaper as well. Many sites (a lot of blogs) make use of includes to keep a consistant look and make things easier to design. While the features are nice that they are offering, I'm not sure how their costs are going to match up to what people are wanting; especially at GeoCities where people are used to free everything.
posted by benjh at 9:14 AM on March 11, 2002

What about the bandwidth? I keep a hobby site (as in, it will never be profitable and that's not even the point) and the pop-ups are well worth the 3gb bandwidth per month (which I surpass slightly on a regular basis and thus need). I'd love to be proved wrong, but so far, all the hosts I've been checking out offer significantly less than 3 gbs/month even if I pay for it. Includes, PHP and whatnot are nice, but you've got to be able to handle the traffic in the first place.
posted by magullo at 9:32 AM on March 11, 2002

But even then, they've started limiting bandwidth on both their free and paid services. I've seen many times, "try back, this site has high bandwidth." Most paid services at 10 bux a month would give you at least 5-10 GB of transfer.
posted by benjh at 9:37 AM on March 11, 2002

Geocities has always offered premium service.

Here's a link from Geocities 1996 (courtesy of the internet wayback machine).
posted by glenwood at 9:49 AM on March 11, 2002

Re bandwidth: GeoCities 'free' has 3gig per month, but it's metered hourly, so if your site gets more than 4 megs of transfer in an hour, it'll have the warning message until the next hour starts, and the counter resets. This has pros and cons. Pro is that no matter how high your traffic, some people will get to see it each hour, unlike if you maxed out your monthly allottment. Bad is that it can't handle a flash crowd, like a slashdotting (or mefistorm).

The lowest premium service that Geo offers is $4.95 a month, and gives 5 gigs a month of transfer, without ads, and calculated monthly, not hourly. $5 for 5 gigs transfer (or 10 gigs for $8.95, or 20 gigs for $11.95) is a better deal than you'll find most places, and though there are other limitations for the bottom package (25 megs storage) it's still a good deal for certain groups, especially those who don't know HTML and use Geo's online page creation tools.

Personally, I pushed to have PHP included in the Pro and Webmaster packages, but ces't la vis. If you don't use scripting (*cough*blogger*cough*) and have a site that could use the higher bandwidth alottments, this might be the right place to go. Their pipes are huge and the sites don't tend to go down as often as a lot of ISPs I could mention.
posted by kfury at 10:04 AM on March 11, 2002

Geocities is going to be stopping FTP access in a few weeks for their free hosting, so the only way to edit your page will be through their web interface, which should stop anyone using blogger with geocities.
posted by bobo123 at 11:01 AM on March 11, 2002

It would stop people from using blogger with free geocities, yes. They'd either have to migrate their site to another free host, or upgrade to Geo Pro for $4.95 a month. But hey, no ads...
posted by kfury at 11:22 AM on March 11, 2002

I agree that most users will find a way to host content themselves, whether on a machine they set up physically or a service they access remotely.

recently I created a set of scripts for ZOPE to manage sites easily... ZOPE renders content through templates, so editors don't really have to know much html - but there's only a single management interface by default, and it's overbearing as a site (content) management editor. (ZOPE is an application server, so the management interface has a lot of stuff on it designed for app development, configuration and monitoring.)

it's called SiteBoiler, and you can create a demo account to see how it works... it's a ZOPE account, too. I'll soon be posting this on zope.org as a release.

although some are blocked on my server for security reasons, ZOPE supports HTTP PUT, WebDAV and FTP protocols for storing content back to the database... which means html editors can be used to change templates - programs like Dreamweaver, GoLive and Amaya.

I will eventually consider hosting this as a service if it becomes widely used and there is sufficient demand, but I don't have the network resources yet. Momentum could be increased by template designers who wanted to get involved in order to boost the choice of presentation styles... *hint*, *hint* ;-)
posted by gkr at 12:08 PM on March 11, 2002

I can't see paying geocites $20 when for that amount there are so many higher quality hosting options.

I'm going to plug my longtime host LFC Hosting. I payed $50/quarter. I got ASP,PHP,SQL support, plus POP3 mail. They allow unlimited traffic. Well not really, they say if you start to average over 3gb/month, they will contact you to work something out. It's a small company, so you can talk to actual people if you want.

I don't use them anymore, but that's just because I now use my own servers.
posted by patrickje at 12:25 PM on March 11, 2002

When you say no more FTP access, do you man I can't use geocities ftp to link, or I can't use their file manager to upload files and edit html files?
posted by jmd82 at 12:45 PM on March 11, 2002

Makes me glad that I got a domain for Christmas.
posted by Kafei at 12:59 PM on March 11, 2002

Oh, and jmd, Geocities' Upload feature will stay for free users. Just thought you needed to know.
posted by Kafei at 1:01 PM on March 11, 2002

Makes me glad that I got a domain for Christmas.

But having a domain isn't the same thing as having hosting for that domain.
posted by rodii at 3:20 PM on March 11, 2002