"Subhosting?", you ask. Yes, subhosting. "Subhosting" is a word that was coined by somebody I know, to reassure his ISP that he was not a reseller. Geocities is the provider which hosts all of these pages. I don't want you to walk away with any other idea. I'm not setting up a new provider "powered by Geocities", or anything else that smacks of TOS violation.

Subhosting is a concept that was originally applied to pages on for-pay ISPs. The idea was that while your $15-30/month bought one 10 Meg or more of webspace, most of the sites out there were using maybe 50K of that, and weren't likely to use much more. Hardly any were in danger of maxing out on space. Eventually, a lot of the smaller sites would disappear, because this was all just too much expense and trouble, for a mere page or two. Subhosting was the solution to this problem.

Somebody with a small site would approach somebody who was more invested in getting his site going and ask, "do you have any spare space". The guy with the larger site would say "yeah, sure", and a copy of the little site would be set up in a new subdirectory of the big site. This worked out for everybody. The small site owner got to stay online. The owner of the bigger site, who really was becoming a "webmaster" now , got extra hits for his own pages, because he'd get to insert a link back to his own pages, on the sites he was subhosting. This didn't really cost the ISPs anything, because the people who were getting subhosted were people about to leave the system anyway. In fact, by keeping pages online that would otherwise have vanished, subhosting made the Internet more attractive to surfers, helping business for all of the ISPs. Only a little more attractive, because subhosting hasn't caught on yet, but some of us hope that it will. We might all end up looking at fewer dead sites, and who isn't tired of seeing 404Error pages? So far, so good, ... but Geocities is a free website provider. Why subhosting, here?

Because Geocities has taken to deactivating sites which aren't updated often enough. No problem for my site, as it is the home to a sizable socially oriented list on Yahoogroups, and bound to be updated in the future. But what about the homepage for a list with 15 members on it? We get back into the area of "too much hassle". Thus, the virtues of subhosting one free site on another, and that's just what ended up being done on this site.

Did that answer your question? Then let's move on.