Yahoo says its shutting down the hoary Geocities "later this year": Geocities was an early Web hosting site that allowed its members to create truly horrible, horrible designs that by today's standards would cause your eyeballs to melt out of their sockets. Honestly, the sites were ugly even in the mid-1990s. Yahoo bought Geocities 10 years ago for the hilarious sum of $4.6 billion (largely stock, as I recall). The site, which offers free hosting, still sees 12 million unique visitors per month.
Later this year, Yahoo will provide more migration details before it shuts everything down for good. Yahoo has paid hosting options ($5/month for 12 months, then $10/month), including a domain name, email, and so forth.
Yahoo's hosted services offer unlimited disk space, data transfer, and email storage, but the boys and girls at Yahoo like to define unlimited to mean whatever they want it to mean, something that's gotten other companies (like Verizon) in trouble before. Read this bit of nonsense:
"If you use your services consistently with the Terms of Service and these paragraphs, your site can grow as large as necessary to meet your small business needs, but to ensure a great experience for all, we will place some constraints on how fast you can grow. The vast majority of our customers' sites grow at rates well within our rules, but our abuse controls may cause a brief delay while we evaluate if expansion is appropriate."
Which means, "We have rules, which we're not telling you, because we think you'll game the system, because we don't trust you, and we're the adults, and even though we don't tell you the rules, we're judging by these secret rules while pretending that 'unlimited' means 'whatever amount we decide secretly you deserve.'"
