If you used the Internet in the ’90s, you probably remember GeoCities. This popular web-hosting service was active in the U.S. from 1994-09 (and until 2019 in Japan). It hosted tens of millions of personal websites at its peak.

What Was GeoCities?

In the mid-1990s, the World Wide Web (as it was called at the time) was a new frontier. Ordinary people could publish any kind of information—no matter how niche—for worldwide consumption.

However, it took some fairly beefy computer servers to handle web server software at that time. And those servers required expensive, speedy network connections, so website hosting was costly at first. A customer would pay a monthly fee (like $10) to rent a few megabytes of space on a remote web server—or they might get some web space with an ISP subscription.

Web publishing was primitive back then. To publish a site, you’d typically edit an HTML file in a text editor, and then upload it (along with some images) to the web server via an FTP client and a lot of patience.