Yahoo has pulled the plug on GeoCities, the free service that hosts personal home pages for punters after ten years of operation.

The search engine outfit splashed out more than $4 billion for GeoCities more than a decade ago. Those were in the days of the dotcom boom when people were writing cheques for ideas that were just plain silly.

According to a posting on a Yahoo Help page for GeoCities the service was no longer accepting new customers and that it will be closing later this year, with more details about how individuals can save their data coming this summer.

Yahoo has been cutting its costs like a mad thing since Chief Executive Carol Bartz took the reins in January. Several products products have gone the way of the Dodo including Jumpcut, an online service for editing videos.

GeoCities was the social notworking site of its day with more than 3.5 million websites hosted on its service in the late 1990s.  However it was dead end technology and has been largely replaced by the likes of Facebook and MySpace.