Geocities offers free web hosting and paid web hosting. I have had some experience with free hosting, it is useful for beginners which do not know anything about web design, as there are ways to start on a site with Geocities free templates and pagebuilders, however for an experience webmaster, this may not be the right host.
Geocities also offer other plans such as $4.95/Month for a total of 500MB of space and 25GB of bandwidth. If you compare this with some hosting services which you pay for almost the same amount and get 5 times the size and bandwidth, perhaps this is not worth it.
One very downside of all Geocities hosting is that unfortunately, Geocities is blocked in many countries. That is, for certain that China cannot access Geocities websites. I have met a few people who have tried to go on a website hosted on Geocities, and it does not work. Perhaps some country have level of security or just like blocking sites, which makes it difficult as if you create a site, you would want all countries to be able to access it.
The Geocities Pagebuilder is one feature which can be helpful for beginners. When I first started building a website and had no idea what I was doing, the Pagebuilder helped me realise how webpages worked. It was a start, therefore if you are thinking creating your first site, Geocities is a good idea. The Pagebuilder allows you to edit the pages without the need of having a software on your computer such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage. However, you have to be connected to the internet to edit and preview pages.
The one thing I do not like about Pagebuilder is that many times, it has problems saving. Imagine working for a long time, having quite a lot of things added, but saving it failed, and your internet disconnected. You would’ve lost a lot of hard work.
In the Geocities free package, there is always an ad on the right side. This can be annoying to visitors as parts of the webpage would be covered by this ad. Another thing is you do not have options for a domain, which some free services do offer, this means that you could buy your domain name and direct your name servers to Geocities. This does not work with the free hosting. The bandwidth can sometimes be a problem as there is a very small limits, and I have had websites which are down so often in each hour because the limits are used up.
Geocities is good for anyone to start a website, which do not intend to have many files, as the space is limited and so is the bandwidth. If you were like me just starting out and wanting to learn about creating web pages and simply having a small site and work your way towards learning more about it, then Geocities could help a lot, as by building a site on Pagebuilder, you can learn a lot from it, such as how web pages link to each other, what are html codes and many others.
Rating: 3