Not that this is news to anyone...

[helen99]

A couple of old Geocities sites that I'm linked to were timing out when I tried to access them just now (trying to update links on the website).

I looked up Geocities to see what was up, and found this. The end of the article says, "On 1st October 2008 Geocities removed old sites from their servers thereby losing countless website builders all of their sites."

I guess that might explain it, but the pages just timed out - I didn't get a "not found," so I assume the pages are still there (maybe). I do know Yahoo!Geocities severely limited the bandwidth for free sites in recent years, so that could also be it... or my ad-blocking options prevent the pages from loading... or the server itself is overloaded.

In any case, I think they outlived their usefulness as a reliable web host many years ago, so if you have old material that you care about stored on Geocities, you may want to back it up.

Comments

[rebelfilms.livejournal.com]

Angelfire is a good free hosting site if a bit swamped with ads. www.weebly.com however is STUNNING for free webhosting and creation. *big weebly fan here*

[helen99.livejournal.com]

I will check out Weebly, thanks! I've been looking for a good free host.

Angelfire

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Angelfire is having the same "Timeout" problem that Yahoo!Geocities is having. Weird.

Re: Angelfire

[rebelfilms.livejournal.com]

yikes! *checks on theatre group website*

Re: Angelfire

[rebelfilms.livejournal.com]

Phew, we're OK.

Re: Angelfire

[helen99.livejournal.com]

I think the current problem is with my workplace rather than with Angelfire or Geocities. Both of these worked fine from home, but still fail to load from my work computer (probably just as well - they tend to deposit adware). They're not actively blocked, but they time out if I try to access them, as if the server was very busy or experiencing problems.

Geocities has purged old sites without notice, but that seems to be unrelated to my inability to access them at the moment.

[drchuck1968.livejournal.com]

You may want to try 110mb. It is ad free, and has PHP support. You have to log in to the control panel every 120 days, otherwise they shut off your site, but they send you an email reminder about that.

http://www.110mb.com/

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Hm. I'll check them out. ad free is good...

110MB ftw

[helen99.livejournal.com]

I put one of the sites I host over on 110mb. Turns out I'd already set up an account for that site, but didn't realize I was allowed FTP access at no additional charge, so I abandoned it a while ago. Loading 500 files 3 at a time would not have worked too well.

When I went to look at it yesterday, I recognized the site and remembered the account information. This time, I figured out that they actually do allow FTP access at no additional charge, so I uploaded the site (not rialian.com - another site). The site is fairly extensive (over 500 files) but the site seemed to have no problem uploading them all with the exception of one movie.

They don't allow anything over 8 MB and unless I'm mistaken, they don't want people to store video on 110MB. This is fine with me since only have that one movie, and I can link to it from elsewhere. There were very few glitches if any. It's sometimes a little slow, but nothing serious - most of the time the pages load pretty fast.

[invaderxan.livejournal.com]

Would it be showing my age to say -- I remember using Geocities when I was a kid! :P

[helen99.livejournal.com]

They were actually kind of cute when they first started. I liked their concept of classifying sites into cities (most of my friends ended up in Area 51). They went downhill after a while though - too many ads, too many subscribers. Finally Yahoo took them over and they canceled their cities concept and became just another ad farm. Eh well.

It started around 1997 I think, which was 11 years ago -- so if you're around 22 or 23 now, that would put you at about 11 in 1997, (which is a young and curious yet oddly intellectual age when websites on Geocities may be appealing). Of course "kid" could be defined as anything from 6 - 16, so there's a range...

Happy B-day...

[kaifoxx.livejournal.com]

Just thought I'd catch ya a few hours early. :)

Hope you have a good one.

Re: Happy B-day...

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Thanks! (not my real b-day but it is my adopted one - too many bad things happened on the real one).

[rebelfilms.livejournal.com]

oooh and HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Thanks! My adopted birthday was fun!

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Many reasons to celebrate! Happy Day to You!!!

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I hope you're feeling better!

[shadomere.livejournal.com]

Wishing you a Happy Birthday!! :D

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Only it's not really my birthday. See, what happened was, my mom, dad and brother in law all died within days of my real birthday (not all the same year, but very close to the date). The idea of celebrating anything that day (which is the day before tax day) was kind of a lost cause. Then last year I got married on Halloween and changed my name, so technically the person called by my current name was "born" that day. I dunno. I feel kind of bad having people wish me a happy birthday when really it isn't. It's a pretty cool day though, and I kind of really have disowned my real one.

[shadomere.livejournal.com]

I can say that makes total sense to me. So we say "Birthday" and you hear/read "Specialday". It's still very special, still counts in my book! :)

Happy Anniversary then too!

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Thanks! It was fun (we bought ourselves a chain saw...)