Yahoo! shuts down GeoCities

Yahoo! shuts down GeoCities

From the 2nd on November onwards. Geocities will no longer be available to Yahoo! Users. This was reported by Yahoo! Who in efforts to increase profits have decided to move their investments elsewhere.

This is a good example of what happens when using a free hosting company. Despite the benefits of a 'no cost startup', these companies are forced to allocate very little resources and cram alot of users onto the same servers to reduce their costs. This greatly reduces the reliability and speeds of the user's websites.

Imagine : you've spent hundreds of dollars at setting up your new website only to have it inaccessible or loading very slowly due to the server being overloaded by other users. Or perhaps you find that your business email account is constantly inaccessible. These are just some of the pit falls of using a free hosting service.

Therefore sometimes paying a few dollars a month isn't a too bad idea if you're serious about your website. For example you get your own domain name! 'http://www.yourdomain.com' sure beats 'http://www.geocities.com/yourcompanyname' anytime right? Other benefits of using a paid service are :

- reliable support
You don't have to wait a whole day just to get your question replied.

- dedicated resources
Servers are usually well maintained and managed.

- Uncluttered Server
Providers will normally have a maximum limit to the amount of users on each server to ensure maximum effeciency.

- Server location
You get to pick the location of your server if the provider allows it.

Therefore if your're serious about your website, a few dollars a month would far outweigh the disadvantages of a free hosting provider.

However all these technicalities like bandwidth , linux / windows / , php / asp support , various databases etc that comes with choosing a web hosting provider can prove to be a headache.
Therefore if you really mean business, then perhaps you can consider getting a company who will design your website and host it for you at the same time!

Such providers are usually alot more reliable and take care of everything for you. So all you need to do is take care of your business.

Take us at Thomson Web Design (http://www.twd.sg) for example. We take care of all our customer needs - so well that they don't have to worry about anything at all. We design their websites , we take care of the domain registrations for them, then we host it for them on our own servers based in Singapore.

On top of that, we also have technicians available round the clock to attend to any issues our customers might have and ensure that the necessary technical help is administered to ensure uptime of their websites.

So if you are serious about your website, perhaps you can consider a provider that will take care of everything for you.

- Admin
Thomson Web Design
http://www.thomsonwebdesign.com.sg