# Geocities

GeoCities is the name of a defunct web hosting service, that was first founded in 1994-11 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and was first known as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI) for a short time, until it was renamed to "GeoCities". On the 1999-01-28, Geocities was acquired by Yahoo!; at that time it was the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web. The "cities" were named after real cities or regions according to their content-for example, computer-related sites were placed in "SiliconValley" and those dealing with entertainment were assigned to "Hollywood"-hence the name of the site. Shortly after its acquisition by Yahoo!, this practice was abandoned in favour of using the Yahoo! member names in the URLs.

In 2009, approximately ten years after Yahoo! bought GeoCities, the company announced that it would be shutting down the service in the USA in 2009-10. At the time there were at least 38 million user-built pages on GeoCities before it was shut down. Nine-years-later in October 2018-10, Yahoo! announced that it would be closing GeoCities Japan at the end of 2019-03. These services weren't actually costing Yahoo! much money at all, with the main reason for the shutdown being poor management by Yahoo!.

## References

1. Original wiki article about this subject
2. Geocities