Last week Yahoo announced plans to shut down GeoCities, an old-school web hosting service, later this year.

"We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways," the company stated.

"We'll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time," the help page states.

Options for other web hosting services were not given, but GeoCities — which began life in 1994 as BHI, or Beverly Hills Internet — joins a number of other Yahoo properties that are dying on the vine: Farechase, Yahoo Briefcase, Yahoo Pets, My Web, RSS ads, Yahoo Live, Kickstart and Yahoo For Teachers.

GeoCities was purchased by Yahoo in 1999.