Yahoo has been trimming down services and products for a while now and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. Few though have such a history and significance behind them as GeoCities, the free website hosting service that Yahoo acquired ten years ago for $3.65 billion and which will close down completely on October 26. The closure has been announced for a while and now Yahoo has sent out a warning to all existing users putting an exact date on the closure and urging them to find alternative solutions.

“Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community, is closing on October 26, 2009,” Yahoo's notice to existing customers reads. “On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files. If you'd like to move your web site, or save the images and other files you've posted online, you need to act now.”

Yahoo is offering several options to existing users offering to move their sites to Yahoo's Web Hosting service, which will cost them $4.99 per month for the first year and then $9.95 per month onwards. GeoCities Plus customers, who already pay for the service, can move without any additional charges. Yahoo also suggests other options but urges the users to move quickly as after the 26th the files won't be available and will be deleted from the servers.

At the time, Yahoo's acquisition of GeoCities was seen as spectacular and the $3.65 billion price made the headlines. 1999 was of course the height of the dot com bubble followed by the now legendary dot com burst. Back then though, the site was the third most visited online property after Yahoo and AOL but several bad decisions from Yahoo, spurred by the lack of revenue, and the fact that the service itself was quickly becoming obsolete, have seen its user numbers and traffic drop dramatically leading to the decision to close it down earlier this year. That said, the closure marks the end of an Internet era.