Dear GeoCities:

Congratulations, Geocities, on realizing that my website is generating a
lot of traffic.

It IS very popular and has been receiving a large amount of traffic. You
might like me to think that it has become so popular, in fact, that your
records indicate that I'm using more than the allotted amount of data
transfer you provide for a free web site, but anyone able to toilet
themselves can see that that isn't the case.  You are running some silly
little autobot program that can't discriminate direct HTML calls from
pings, and you really think that it is "catching" the larger bandwidth
users of your site.  Fact is, your stupid program is sending these
messages to just about every web site owner in your domain, and just
pissing them off.  Your brilliant insight can't see that the net effect
of "turning off" sites is making people abandon you in droves.  You are
"shutting down" sites that only receive a handful of true hits per week.

Do you owe me free webspace?

Of course you don't.  But last I checked, my site was getting 1500-1700
hits per day.  That's 1500-1700 surfers per day, coming to MY site, so
they can see MY stuff, and YOU were putting annoying ads in front of
their faces.  Selling advertisements to annoy visitors of MY site who
could car less about finding an old high school reunion classmate.  Of
course, Geocities is realizing that free domain space isn't the
lucrative business it once was, and folks like me are realizing that
free web space is going the way of the dinosaur.  Just like everybody
else, I'll have to pony up my 5 bucks a month to keep my website up.  In
the end, I think that will insure more quality websites on the net as
folks like me will have decide if what we contribute to the web is
really worth our 5 bucks a month.  Well I have decided and to me, it is
worth $5/month.

Oh you have a deal for $4.95/mo?

Nice try.  Your offerings are weak, non competitive and I have no plans
to stay with a server provider who couldn't realize that my site was one
that might have generated some ad revenue, if not just the visibility of
a Geocities domain name.  You missed your chance, I'm gone, as are
probably THOUSANDS of others.  For $5 a month I can get my own domain
name, FTP and about three times the space you offer and no "data transfer"
limitations.  (not to mention tripod, who for FREE gives 50megs, with 
considerably less annoying ads)

Lets hope your parents a Yahoo have the common sense to turn your small
office of geeks over to monster.com and that their resumes are current
and useful.   For me, getting a real web hosting company for $5 is, as
you said on a weekly basis, "just a few clicks away!"

If you'd prefer not to get this and similar e-mails regarding your new
bandwidth policing, don't worry about it.  Soon enough all your site
owners will have left and things will truly quiet down.
 

Thank you,