Geocities is not accepting new accounts anymore.
The true problem seems to be the sites will be deleted along with the accounts, throwing in a black hole a lot of obsolete but precious sites from the past.
Actually Geocities (which started as an indipindent company and was later purchased by Yahoo) was becoming obsolete and the most of the webmasters had already abandoned it, but until the first half of this decade it was the most popular free service to publish a site, especially in the pre-blog Web 1.0 age.
Many sites which have not been updated, but include knowledge you wouldn't like to completely disappear from the web, are still on Geocities. I'm mostly thinking to fan sites of underground bands, sometimes they are the only sites at all dedicated to some bands.
Sure, you can move your existing site, but the webmasters who haven't updated their sites in the last 5 years won't probably even care to move them to another host. If you're one of them, plase take some time to move your site, you might not care anymore about it, but someone else might do.
Some of you will remember that all my sites started on Geocities, the first being A New Order Fan, nine years ago, which is amazingly still getting visits. It gradually evolved into this blog, and I'm slowly importing older posts backwards (I'm doing the 2005 posts now) and will eventually get to the old site, which is still on my hard disk anyway.
The Gabrielles Wish official site also started on Geocities.
So it's just sad for me to see such an important place for me to disappear.
Apparently, Bravenet is still carrying on its free host service, which is preferred from webmasters uploading sites completely made by themselves through coding or computer software.
Also, many free services emerged giving you the ability to create and host a site with modern online publishing tools, such as Google Sites, Weebly and Jimdo. You can't completely customize the sites and you can't import traditional HTML pages (though you can insert HTML as a page element), but there are many layout options.
Finally, Blogger and Wordpress have evolved so much you can almost organize a blog as a site, with more archiving power than a traditional site.
When social networks were yet to emerge in the pre-MySpace age, pages on Geocities were also the most popular tool for people to do a personal page about their interests, thanks to a page wizard and an online visual editor, today both looking really obsolete when compared to what people is doing on Facebook and MySpace, though on the other side people can also be content with posting short messages on an even simpler service like Twitter.
