Yahoo! announced recently that it is shutting it’s Geocities hosting at the end of 2009 and asking users of this free hosting service to move to their yahoo! Hosting service instead.

A number of early domainers and web site pioneers hosted their sites and pointed their names to a free Geocities account.

These sites will likely disappear altogether, since people change their email addresses and will be unaware of the change.

Personally, I’ve never seen a Geocities hosted site that I liked, so it’ll be no great loss.

But of course, some have good search engine ranking and backlinks – which will be wasted unless the owner moves their hosting to a new account.

The moral of the story is avoid free hosting and get yourself a proper hosting account pronto!