With the exception of one site by a close friend (who stubbornly refuses to move it), you'll note that I do not link to any Geocities sites, nor will I.  Even if the best site on a particular topic is on Geocities (which isn't likely), I'd rather link to an inferior site.  Why?  First, they switched from banner ads to pop-up Javascript ads.  These are not only annoying and intrusive, but they can crash browsers, and most of the time don't work properly.  Their access has always been slow, and the ads just make it slower.  Also their file upload service is slow and clunky, and they have an unpleasant happiness of losing one's web page. 

    But the final straw was the translucent "Geocities" in the corner of the screen, much like those obnoxious icons on your TV screen.  Not only does this compromise the page's owner's creativity and layout, it often fails to function properly and is intrusive when it does.  Also, I believe that Geocities is the first server to start using an icon of that sort, which means they might have started some sort of noxious trend.  If all web servers start doing that, I'll make my own web host before I subscribe to any of them.  It's an odious practice to smear the host's name all over someone's original web site.  The name is in the domain, after all, and in those @#$% pop-up ads.   In general, Geocities has turned their on-line community into a media outlet, using their members' pages to try to get more members and thus negating the original content.   Geocities is, of course, a free service -- and worth every penny.

    I've found Fortunecity to provide vastly superior service in every area -- updating, downloading, space available, only one banner ad on the site -- though they're not perfect (not being able to have files over one megabyte in size is obnoxious), they're a damn site better than Geocities.