GeoCities is large. Very, very large. Not when compared to, say, the likes of MySpace or Facebook. But compared to your average garden variety website, it is huge. Given that, when GeoCities first launched in 1994, the average hard drive was somewhere around 500 MB, to store multiple hundreds of gigabytes must have been a complicated technological feat to achieve.

RAID was already around, but those 'inexpensive' disks were, for the most part, not that inexpensive. Storage technology was several orders of magnitude slower and had a smaller capacity than today. In spite of all that, you can't just go and make a copy like you could do with any other set of page. Yesterday's giants are still pretty big.