Heh, I'm old enough to remember that experience!

But yeah, it's basically like that but with some more modern features like being able to do this from a browser (no filezilla required!) and better control over HTTP headers and such.

All of that could be done in Geocities as well =)

Geocities was enormously popular for good reasons.

However, I don’t think it had the ability to preview a deploy or roll it back with 100% certainty that it will be exactly as was before, which is something you really need when deploying is (too) easy.

I have seen those exact words to describe Netlify - it's like Geocities, but for the modern web. I have yet to try it out for myself, but I'm thinking I may use it to get a personal site up and running since I have a tendency to take the power of running my own site on my own VPS a bit too far by changing it up (and usually breaking it) frequently...

There's also Neocities as an acceptable replacement for Geocities. It's also free, unless you want to use your own domain, which requires a $5/mo "donation" to become a Neocities supporter and unlock that and a few other features.

I wonder how they are doing. I hope they don't share the same fate as Geocities.

The guy who runs the site gave a talk a while back about how crazy cheap it is to host it, and why cloud vendors like Amazon and Google are making suckers out of people.

"High Volume, Bandwidth Heavy Infrastructure On The Cheap"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i6wvix6buI

And I'm pretty sure he's also cryptocoin-rich, anyway.

If they have but a few supporters I suppose they get all the running costs out of it.