I got something of a surprise this week.
While logging in to continue my slow-but-steady process of rebuilding my site, I found out that Geocities (my host since 2000) will be ceasing their service "later this year." No specific date yet...but later this year could be next month or December 31st or any day in between. I know Yahoo! (the company that owns Geocities) has been jettisoning money-losing projects since their new CEO arrived in January, so I'm not all that surprised to find out that Geocities was on the chopping block. But as a fairly reliable free service, I'm bummed to see it's disappearing.
Looking around, it looks like I'll be moving the 1970s music site to a paid server. While I didn't place the site online to make money, switching to a new host might be beneficial. First of all, I know I'll have plenty of room to expand the site (something Geocities wasn't going to provide due to bandwidth restrictions placed on their free accounts). So I'll be able to break the site up so that each artist can have its own page; fans of the Rolling Stones won't need to scroll down from Eddie Rabbitt's listing and wait for the images to fill in. A nice result is that those annoying Geocities ads can finally be removed from the right side of the page, and I can explore the possibility of having sponsors for artist pages. And having a "real" name for my website as opposed to a generic one is probably something I should've done a long time ago.
Keep checking back here, I'll announce any changes or updates through this blog.
