Once the third most visited domain on the Internet, the now ailing GeoCities will shut down permanently on October 26.
GeoCities was founded in 1994 and was one of the first services offering an easy to use interface, which allowed "mum and dad" users to publish their own websites easily.
GeoCities was considered revolutionary for its time, being one of the first free hosting services on the internet and one of the first to sort domains via their topic, e.g. finance, travel or fashion.
Unfortunately, as the popularity of GeoCities took off the topics available for hosting became many, and the site increased in complexity. The purchase of GeoCities by Yahoo in 1999 only served to make this growing problem even greater. As the dot-bomb of the early noughties took hold, and personal web hosting became affordable, the writing was on the wall for the future of the business.
By April 2009, Yahoo ceased accepting new registrations for the GeoCities service. In June, the company announced that the service would finally be closed in October this year. That day has come.
Digital archiver, Jason Scott has been working tirelessly to backup as much of the service"s content as possible before its closure, which is estimated to be around 10 Terabytes of data.
In reminiscing of the service, Scott said, "...for hundreds of people, this was their first website...Your pet subject or conspiracy theory or collection of writings left the safe confines of your Windows 3.1 box and became something you could walk up to any internet-connected user, hand them the URL, and know they would be able to see your stuff. In full colour. Right now."
A golden milestone in Internet history, now gone forever.