Section 20. Explore GeoCities

20. Explore GeoCities

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

Just jump right in.

Yahoo! GeoCities was one of the first large-scale, free web-hosting services on the Internet. All hosting companies at the most common level do the same thing: They host HTML documents that are served to viewers' browsers, where they are interpreted and displayed for viewers to read. In the beginning of the Web, everyone had to write his or her HTML by hand. HTML is a simple language that is easy to learn, but many beginners still found that the process of displaying the message could be overwhelming.

Because HTML was so easy to write, it was possible to create an application to write web pages and websites that would live on a server and be available for users who had no idea what HTML was all about. Today, there are many options from which to choose on GeoCities that range from free hosting and web page design to commercial-grade web hosting.

1.	Go to http://www.geocities.com You should see the GeoCities home page, where you can select from the various services GeoCities offers.
2.	Click on GeoCities PLUS This is the page in which you can order the GeoCities Plus plan, where you can get 25 megabytes (MB) of storage for your site and get no ads on your website. In the free service, you get 15MB, which is plenty for most people starting on the Web, but you also get advertisements you don't want to have in the long run. Click on the Back button before proceeding to step 3. 20. Explore GeoCities
3.	Click GeoCities PRO This is the page in which you can order the GeoCities Pro package, which gives you the capability to point to a domain name at your site, an email account under your domain name , and 100MB of storage for your email. Click on the Back button before proceeding to step 4.
4.	Click on Yahoo! Web Hosting This is the page that describes the different professional plans for hosting that GeoCities offers. The packages here offer 210 gigabytes (GB) of storage, 25100 different email addresses per domain, and advanced scripting with PHP and Perl, which is used to create dynamic web pages where users can enter data into a database or order products from a shopping cart.