Thursday, April 23, 2009

GeoCities closing down

GeoCities, owned by Yahoo!, will be closing later this year. Genealogists have been using the free web hosting service for many years now. This means it is time to look for new homes for tens of thousands of genealogy web sites out there.

I went through my links for Personal Home Pages and made a list of the free web hosts that I see used most often by genealogists. I can't make personal recommendations on any of these hosts, because I haven't used them myself. But these seem to be the most commonly used:
So, you all get started moving your sites to a new host. Then be sure to let me know about the new, updated web address. I'm still working through thousands of updates for AOL home pages. Hopefully I'll get them done by the time I have to start working on updating GeoCities links.

6 comments:

Evelyn Yvonne Theriault said...

This must be like an oncoming "PERFECT STORM" for you!
Changing all those urls - Yikes!

Evelyn Yvonne Theriault said...

SUGGESTION FOR YOUR READERS: They should also consider moving to a Blog-based platform such as Wordpress, Bloggr etc.
Evelyn in Montreal

Bruce, Norfolk, UK said...

Unfortunately, it's going to be up to individual site owners to make the change themselves. They should already have seen the reminders from Google, and I'm sure there will be more before Geocities finally disappears.

If it's any help, In my opinion, the best free sites are the ones hosted by Rootsweb, if you don't mind Ancestry having its hands on your genealogical data.

GeneaDiva said...

ancestralspace.com is a great place to set up a genealogy profile as well as a blog. Shannon has kindly offered all genealogist the opportunity to move their genealogy content to this great website. Her companion website, http://www.ancestrallychallenged.com/, is a genealogy discussion forum based on locality. This would also be a fantastic website to place genealogy data.

Debi Sargent said...

OMG! I don't envy what you are about to endure...but just for information...I use both ancestry (having to pay monthly, due to the extent of my tree) and have the blogger as the added written text.

Richard said...

Thank you for your kind information. I had a long attachment with Geo Cities. I am fearing about thinking of my account in Geo Cities.

Lets see whats happen.

Thanks a lot.