GeoCities is usually remembered as blinking text, neighborhood names, MIDI files, and homepages about somebody’s cat.
Someone also took a camera into the room where all of that actually lived.
Visit the GeoCities Cage at Exodus Communications
The page says the photographs were taken on May 7, 1999 inside the GeoCities cage at Exodus Communications’ “Wyatt” data center.
That turns an abstract web service into a room full of hardware.
The photos and captions describe rows of Sun Ultra 2 systems attached to MTI JBOD storage arrays. The author estimates roughly 120 clusters and about 12 TB of storage. SCSI cables, Ethernet, console lines, and power snake through the racks. Four Cisco Catalyst 5500 switches handle public and private network traffic.
The page even explains a change in GeoCities’ architecture.
Earlier systems depended heavily on disks attached directly to individual servers. If a web server failed, the locally attached data became unavailable. GeoCities was beginning to move toward Network Appliance file servers mounted over NFS, trading some of that fragility for more centralized, fault-tolerant storage.
That is an unusually useful snapshot because it catches a giant consumer website while the infrastructure underneath it was still visibly evolving.
Twelve terabytes once held a civilization
Today, 12 TB can fit on a couple of consumer hard drives.
In 1999, the page describes an entire fenced server environment built around that scale of storage. Rows of machines sat on raised floors. Cooled air was routed through the racks. Thick bundles of Ethernet cable crossed the cage. Steel rods tied racks together because Silicon Valley earthquake preparation was not theoretical.
It is one thing to say GeoCities hosted millions of personal pages. It is another to see the physical apparatus required to keep those pages alive.
The old web was never weightless. Every dancing baby, fan shrine, guestbook, and JPEG had to exist on spinning disks somewhere.
Pages like this are why CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list matters. The best archaeological finds are not always the famous websites themselves. Sometimes they are tiny side pages documenting the machinery behind them.
GeoCities eventually became internet mythology.
This page shows the rack bolts.