Geocities

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What Does Geocities Mean?

Geocities is a Web domain associated with a free Web hosting service that used to be available in the U.S. but is now only maintained in Japan. The Web hosting service was acquired by Yahoo in 1999, but the company decided to shut it down 10 years later.

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Techopedia Explains Geocities

As a free Web hosting service, Geocities was a model of how large companies could provide public “utilities” for Web users. Individuals registered to receive a hosted domain and uploaded text, images and page content to Yahoo servers. The resulting pages provided an alternative to more developed commercial websites. The Web hosting service now offered by Yahoo is for paying customers and rivals the services of large hosting companies like GoDaddy.

Although Yahoo has closed down Geocities operations, Web users can still access some of the sites built through this service. Archiving efforts have secured some of the 38 million individual sites present at the time of Geocities’ closure. Developers have also created Geocities simulators to make Web pages look like they were created with Geocities.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.