I've just read an e-mail  from Yahoo who have decided to close their (unexplainably) popular free hosting site "GeoCities" on October 26th 2009.

I know this will leave a lot of users with an unattractive choice of paying Yahoos $4.99 per month or moving to a new host.

Fortunately for me I am not in this situation, I no longer use my GeoCities account and haven't done for years but if I was then I know what I would do.
Yahoos' $4.99 per month equates to nearly $60 per year (£36) so I need to come up with a cheaper solution

1. Register a domain name on your own. I wouldn't trust Yahoo to register it for you (I suspect they take ownership of it and won't let you take it with you later). This need not be expensive, 123-reg offer 95p .eu domains and .co.uk aren't much more expensive at £2.99 per year.

2. Sign-up for a low cost hosting package. Even the cheapest packages will offer you more (and better) features than GeoCities. A company I highly recommend would be Big Wet Fish who offer plans from £10.99 per year. 

3. Transfer all of your files from GeoCities to your new hosting provider.

4. Now possibly the most crucial step is to ensure your pages on your geocities domain get redirected to your new domain name before the account gets closed. You need to make sure your users (& the search engines) find your new domain. This should be done with php 301 redirects.

I suspect many of you will be using files with .html or .html file extentions. It is still possible to redirect these files. All you have to do it delete the file from your GeoCities account, create a folder with the same name (including the file extention eg "aboutus.htm"). Inside this folder place a index.php containing the following code.

<?php
header("Location: http://your-new-domain.eu/aboutus.htm", true, 301);
?>

Just repeat this for each of your pages and put a index.php file in the root folder too - obviously changing the new URL to redirect to for each. Make sure you test them all to ensure they redirect properly.

So there we have it,  save your GeoCities site for under £12! I'd be interested to see anyone elses suggestions of free or cheap hosting providers. As well as to hear from anyone facing this difficulty with their GeoCities site.