Geocities is closing down

Yahoo! has announced that they will be closing down Geocities later this year. I have fond memories of the free hosting service. When it opened its doors in the mid-90s, it became my testbed for starting out my html skills. Who knew that years later it will come in handy as an important skill?

It is sad to see Geocities go but I guess its time has finally come. The advent of more interactive sites such as online communities and blogging has eclipsed free hosting services.

So what will I do with our Voltes V website? Transfer it someplace else. And Webrings has just given me a nice alternative. I received an email from them with the following information:

Last month we wrote to all active members with a registered Geocities URL because Yahoo! is planning on closing Geocities down soon.

Now we are expanding this appeal to ALL users in an effort to reach as many people as possible, whether they have a Geocities website or not. Even whether they are WebRing members or not.

Thanks to our recently launched Webspace, you can have your website hosted on WebRing. WebRing webspaces are completely free for all WebRing members! You can read about how to move your site to your Webspace at http://www.webring.com/h/geomove.

To date we've replicated over 2000 sites, mainly from Geocities, but also sites from Angelfire, Tripod, Fortunecity and several others. If you're one of the 2000+, THANK YOU, and now go tell someone how easy it has been!

Here is our challenge to you: Help us spread the word to ANYONE you have contact with and tell them about our offer. This is not limited to Geocities members. We encourage anyone with a "free" site - especially Angelfire and Tripod because of their instrusive ads - to consider WebRing's new Webspace. It's FREE, and it's ad free for anyone who creates a webspace or asks us to help replicate from another service.

Email your friends, post in blogs, add a link to your website, go door to door (just kidding).

Why switch? For starters, Geocities and Lycos are closing down. More importantly than that, WebRing has numerous advantages over other services:

* We've been around for 15 years.
* We're not placing ads on your pages.
* WebRing has a member directory, so your site can gain visibility there. We have plans to expand our directory as well.
* Most important - you gain exposure through the tens of thousands of WebRing communities that have been driving traffic to sites since before most of these services existed.

Our Offer: Would you like our help in replicating your site(s) to your WebRing Webspace? Simply reply to this email and say "Yes, please transfer my site." We'll attempt to automatically replicate your site. In most cases this works well.

You can read about the transfer process here:
http://www.webring.com/h/geomove
and here:
http://www.webring.com/h/nl_0906

If you want to transfer your site files on your own, you can access your personal storage (when logged in) at: (url for my eyes only)


Who should not transfer? If you have your website hosted on your own domain then we recommend you keep it there. If you run cgi-scripts, or have your site hosted on a non-free service that you're happy with then stick with them.

Sincerely,
WebRing Member Services
membership@webring.com

Still skeptical?

If you think it's going to take too much work to move over your site, we invite you to read a WebRing member's personal account:

http://pg.webring.com/cgi-bin/members/blog.cgi?userid=9970254786008&targetdate=2009_4_22&monthyear=Apr_2009 - "How WebRing Saved My Butt and My Website"