First of all, I think Geocities is providing a really great service, and given that fact that they allow something like 10 megs of webspace for free, as far as I can tell they're doing a lot of people a really big favor. However, aside from playing musical chairs with their domain name during the acquisition by Yahoo as well as adding pop-up advertisements, both of which I could live with, there are two things they've done which have made me decide that a move was in order.
1. On 08-Oct-01 geocities wrote me an email informing me that my homepage was using too much bandwidth and asking me to pay money for more bandwidth. Here's an excerpt:
Congratulations, http://www.geocities.com/jimvassila seems to be very popular and has been receiving a large amount of traffic. Our records indicate that you're using more than the allotted amount of data transfer we provide for a free web site, which is 3 gigabytes per month (measured on an hourly basis). That means that during the past few days we had to temporarily turn your site off to keep the bandwidth within this limit.
For those who don't know, bandwidth is a measure of how much data people are transfering from your homepage. Since I'm distributing several programs, and these tend to be large, the page's bandwidth usage is high. In order to compensate, I've tried to minimize the graphics and keep the overall formating as simplistic as possible, however, bandwidth usage was still too high, and so I couldn't really fault geocities too much... after all, they were still providing me with a free service. Nonetheless, it caused me to ponder whether or not a move might be in order. After all... I didn't want visitors to be unable to get my programs because of this bandwidth quota.
2. Sometime toward the end of November 2001 I discovered that my forms were no longer functioning. For those who don't know about forms, they are html pages where web visitors can enter input. The form sends this user input into a cgi (a web-based program often written in perl), which turns the input into an email which it mails to the owner of the form. I began using forms a few years ago, and I really liked the fact that geocities provided a perl-cgi to process them, sending me the user inputs as email. However, sometime in early August 2001, geocities apparently removed this perl-cgi w/o telling anyone. Hence, while people continued filling out forms on my webpages (or so I assume), their input went straight to a non-existant cgi, and hence never reached me. Now, if geocities had emailed everyone telling us what they were doing, that would have been fine, but to lose several months of form responses because of a lack of communication... that just wasn't acceptable. I did poke around and discovered that they had a new cgi up and running, however, it didn't seem to work as well as the old one, so it was at this point that I decided that it was high time to move these pages.
Why I'm taking the time to explain all this is that I personally hate it when one of the webpages I like to visit keeps hopping from host to host. So here's an explanation of why these pages are taking a hop. As for those of you who are planning on putting pages on the web, I'd still recommend geocities so long as you don't plan to use forms and so long as you don't care about your page being shut off every now and then in case it begins to get popular. Other than that, they're a great service... they're up 24/7 and there's almost never a problem connecting... and, of course, they're still free. What more can you ask for? As for myself, I'm going to keep my account here, I'll be watching what happens, and I'll be crossing my fingers hoping that Geocities gets better rather than getting worse. So you may see these pages back here someday. Until then, however, they'll be at http://www.elektrasystems.net/~jimv