Yahoo closing Geocities web hosting service

Yahoo will close Geocities, the free web hosting service it paid $4bn for 10 years ago.

Yahoo! said that it will close its GeoCities service that provides people a free online locale for home pages.

New accounts are no longer being accepted for GeoCities, according to a post on its Web site.

The service will be close sometime later this year, Yahoo said.

GeoCities, known for its gaudy design, was a cutting edge service in the late 1990s that was later overtaken by blogs and social networking sites like MySpace.

After buying GeoCities, Yahoo failed to make significant upgrades to the site, although it still had 12 million unique visitors in March, according to comScore.

Yahoo has promised to release more details about the Geocities date of closure and how users can save their site data soon.