Tough financial times are far reaching sometimes, especially right now. Even the internet giant Yahoo has felt the effects. They have made the decision to shut down GeoCities. The website has been providing web hosting and guidance to newcomers. They didn't charge for the whole 10 years that they have been in the game. Yahoo decided that their time was past.

In July, Yahoo let the world know that GeoCities would be closing at the end of October this year. Although, this was a free web host Yahoo has determined that they can no longer afford to run GeoCities and has offered users of this service a plan that will allow them to keep their web hosting but they must choose from a variety of paid plans now.

When you get started with a paid web host service you will notice that you don't have to deal with any ads any more. Those can be a real pain to deal with and not having them there is a blessing. Because there are so many new forms of social media around, GeoCities can't keep up with them. It hasn't been able to for a long time now. They are working on saving some of the first sites from them so that people can check out what is was like when the internet first started.

Yahoo has owned GeoCities for a while (since 1999) and actually purchased this web hosting service for a little less than $3 billion and during that time it has served as precursor to many of the social media and self publishing tools of today. And although it is being trimmed as fat it has served Yahoo well for their small investment ten years ago.

With all the rapid advances that are made involving internet use and computers, that is a lot to keep up with. Any company that wants to stay afloat has to be able to roll with the changes. Yahoo is doing it, and that is just one of the reasons that they are one of the big guys, and probably will be for some time.