Classicgaming.com to shut down hosting

Following in the footsteps of Geocities, I've just learned that Classicgaming.com (and all other parts of the IGN/GameSpy network) are going to shut down their public site hosting at the end of August. If you know of any good sites in those, you better check up on them pretty soon.

That's really sad to hear. The Castlevania Dungeon is a great website and full of useful information on Castlevania.

Well, as previously stated in another topic, you can archive whole sites with this spider program:
http://www.httrack.com

But seriousy, what is up with this mass extinction of private websites all of a sudden?

I think it's mainly the economic problems everyone is facing. Hosting a bunch of sites can be expensive for a big company. These days, almost everyone has an ad blocker software running on their browser, so these kinds of sites don't generate much revenue for the companies in question. It probably costs more to host the sites than they bring in. I'm not sure if that's actually much of a factor on the Gamespy sites as I don't know their ad set up, but I'm sure it was on the Geocities decision.

This is really depressing...and I can only wonder who the next victims are going to be from this

Gee, I'm depressed to hear another place is shutting down. I'm still very depressed about Geocities also. I feel bad for all those folks with sites there.

Can you folks imagine a world where no free hosts will remain, and the quality payhosts will be out of many people's price ranges?

Unfortunately, I can. I'm very grateful that I was able to find an inexpensive pay host for this site. It's a fairly bare bones service, but I like that in a way.

As long as the host works how you need it to, that should be good enough for most

One thing I'd not considered that someone at worked mentioned to me this week is that many people are self-hosting their own sites these days. Broadband being rather widely available I guess that really is something one can do.