Slashdot Mirror
Hosting Service Closes 3000 Blogs Without Notice
marmoset writes "Citing the high costs of running the free service, performance
concerns, and health problems, Dave Winer closed down the weblogs.com
hosting service without any prior notice. As many as 3000 sites are now inacessible, and
the users who want to transfer their data elsewhere have to ask
(politely) for it to be exported. As might be expected, reactions range from understanding
to
enraged.
Netcraft has a report, too."
The real question is whether or not this is allowed in the TOS. If it is, well than, that's how the cookie crumbles, users should have been making backups.
If it is not allowed by the TOS than users have a right to be outraged.
The Technonaut
Why would you trust any hosting company to keep the only copy of your data, if it were all that important to you?
You mean all those who have these all-important weblogs don't have any backups of that data anywhere else?
When your data is on someone else's servers, and you don't have any of that data properly backed up, then you are completely at their mercy when it comes to being able to use it or losing it entirely. This is especially true when the service that they are supplying is being provided for free.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
So let me get this straight... He didn't know even 1 day in advance that rising costs and other technical/logistical difficulties were going to force him to shut down service? That seems rather ridiculous and is a huge oversight on his part. To not even warn people that he was having difficulties... it's mind boggling. I'm sure someone would have come to his aid, or at least tried to organize a fund to assist in maintaining service.
Honestly, though... to not see this coming even a few days in advance? That's very disappointing.
The most interesting thing is that Winer announced the withdrawal of service through a poorly recorded audio file. Could it be that he's been struck down with RSI?
Whatever the case, I think he could have shut down the service gracefully, perhaps handing it over to a friend or a third party rather than abruptly pulling the plug. But at the end of the day, he's only damaged his own reputation -- it's not the end of the world for anyone.
I remember when Winer started the site. It was Userland released their blogging software a while back, before blogging was really popular. I thought it was mostly to show off the software and let people "get started". It was not meant to host high-traffic public sites.
Winer says that he will export the sites after July 1. I don't know why he insists "after July 1", or why he didn't say "I am closing them down in X days" but he's pretty stubborn sometimes.
So, I'm not really surprised. I personally wouldn't depend on a third party storing my site for free, without even a local backup.
Never EVER trust some one else to do your backups.
To the poor idiots who have lost "4 years of data" -- you should have realized this was a very real posability. Even if it was due to hardware failure....Sadly, this was due to the expense of running a web site.
Exactly. He wasn't going to alert 3000+ users to only have them suddenly spike his bandwidth cost for the month through the roof. Even with or without 95th percentile billing.
Considering that the majority of the data is displayed on users' browsers, they could have shut down the sites but allowed the owners of the blogs to grab the data. It would probably have been less traffic in the few days before shutdown then normal traffic.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
And THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is why I host MY little blog-like thing on MY OWN site, using MY OWN crappy software. That way I KNOW backups are getting done, and I KNOW when the machine will be down, and if something goes wrong I can fix it MY OWN DAMN SELF.
Sorry if I seem a little callous, but really how hard is it to write a few hundred lines of PHP for a simple online journal with comments? NOT VERY! And it runs on the same machine I use for all my other stuff (DNS, Mail, CVS) so it's not like I'm spending untold thousands extra each month, it really helps make the cost-benefit ratio of my server more tolerable.
Think about it.
/~mikeg
Honestly, the amount of snarky comments along the lines of 'Oh, blogs suck anyway, who cares.', and 'It's all idiotic blabbing anyway.' are getting on my nerves. Really, no one thinks you're one of the cool kids now just because you think blogs are passe. Stop trying to be a post-ironic hipster type who's oh-so-tired of it all. Posting on Slashdot won't get you laid. Neither will having a blog, of course, but that's my point.
I don't understand the level of hostility against blogs. No one's putting a gun to your head and making you read them. I actually support efforts by Google and other search engines to separate blog results from regular webpage results. Sometimes I don't want to have my search results skewed by blogs, and sometimes I really want to know how the 'blogosphere' feels about a particular issue. But while that happens, just ignore them. If you hate them so much, don't read them. But, really, infantile attacks don't make you superior in any way to the bloggers.
I know most blogs are, indeed, just self-centered rambling, or 15 year old girls talking about their latest dream with N'Sync and a pony, but on the other hand, they're valid outlets for a lot of people to just vent, express themselves, and give their opinions on issues. If you don't want to hear those opinions, then just don't visit their blogs. It's that simple.
And yes, I do have a blog of my own, no, I'm not giving out the address here, since it's basically just a self-centered little website that's read by me and maybe 2 friends, and that's fine by me.
"Two things are infinite: the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the first one." - Albert Einstein
Reading the quotes from the article it may not be that cut and dried.
A single person doesn't donate his work to running a service for 4 years then just drop people for the hell of it.
The quotes above sound like he had other intense stuff going on in his life ......things with a higher priority....that forced him to put off dealing with this in a better manner.
Maybe people wouldn't be angry at him if he mentioned the details of these extenuating circumstances, but then again why should he publish the personal details of his life? I'm sure anyone here can imagine several situations to make a hobby project you run the last thing on your list of priorities: a significant death, loss of a job, being forced to move, 1 or more of other things called "life" etc.
BTW, I only heard the term "blog" within the last 2 years, yet one of the quotes from the article said this guy ran weblog for 4 years.
Is the term "blog" newer then this guy's service?
I used to "blog" before the term and the software. I just updated a personal website I had rather frequently.
Steve
3,000 people is nothing compared to a Slashdot flood. The blogs are small. He could have easily shut it down to the general populace, and left it open only to the owners of the existing blogs. It wouldn't have been more traffic then normal.
Yes, it was free. No, you can't do anything about it. And yes, it was still and asshole thing to do.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
To all saying users should backup their blogs...
Exactly how are they supposed to do this?
A fundamental weakness in the blog paradigm is that there is CGI software between you and your raw data, in order to impose a style on it. This is particularly true of third party hosting, which provides cookie-cuter blogs through common software, where the only thing that differes from user to user is a few settings and their URL.
Backups usually only make sense if (1) you can get at the raw, preformatted data, and (2) that getting at that data will do you any good -- e.g. you will be able to externalize it the same way somewhere else.
At this point, blog-hosting service providers really don't have standards for their variable data, so even if you had a backup, it really wouldn't get your blog back up on the net, without a lot of work.
-- Terry
I remember the day when my Livejournal had been totally wiped. Emptied. Back to square one. I sat there dumbfounded, what had happened to my months of entries? I'm not the only one I've seen this happen to.. I guess all you can really do is move on. Losing data sucks.. Be more rigorous in backing up next time and hopefully it won't happen again.
I've lost unreplacable data a few times now (sometimes on my machine, sometimes on someone else's servers). I should have learned my lesson sooner. Even if it *shouldn't* happen, it does happen. Sucks facing hard immovable reality sometimes.
If money and stress were really the problem, why not sell the service to a company and then offer backups. If only a fraction of the people paid up ($15 for a year?) it would have been worth it and fewer people would have gotten pissed.
This guy can do what he wants, but he handled things badly.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
... which in this case is... nothing :P
Seriously, why would you leave data on a free hosting service's servers? You can't count on them. If I use a Hotmail or Yahoo email account, I have to understand it could drop off the planet tomorrow.
It takes big ones to complain about a free service.
How 'bout after each post, go to the blog, then go to file->save as...
It will be HTML, but it could be restored fairly easily by opening the html file in a web browser and copying and pasting into a new blog's post page in another browser window.
It would be inconvenient, but not as hard as you make it out to be.
Anyway, visit my blog. There is a link in the sig. I try to write about interesting things like life on other planets and token-ring adapters rather than just posting the typical masturbatory grousing you find in most other blogs.
Unknown host pong.
There. Now you're up to speed.
That's what I heard in his voice. I wasn't a user so I'm not going to say I understand the frustration of the bloggers but I'm just not seeing the need to attack this guy or his efforts.
This is also a loss not to just the bloggers but the scores of folks who read those blogs. TO be honest it sounds like a loss to him also.
Let us give him the benefit of the doubt and wish him well.
Tojo
I'm concerned to hear that Dave Winer is suffering from health problems. Whatever you think of him and his various endeavors, Dave has been incredibly influential in the Macintosh software and Internet development communities for about as long as I can remember. Incredibly productive, too. I won't try to list all the stuff he's done, but we've all used the fruits of his labor. And he hasn't filed a single patent for any of it.
So screw the blogs and give Dave a break. If there's anyone out there who has earned a bit of understanding, Dave's the guy.
Speedy recovery to you, Dave.
- This is the age group most inclined to get anything and everything they can off Kazaa. Teens have a very limited cashflow and $25 not spent on a CD/website/whatever is a week's worth of food.
- Teens don't have credit cards. If they want to buy something off the web, they have to get a parent's card. This is usually hard or impossible.
So, they have to go for the free hosting. Of course, being greedy bastards, they'll whine and bitch for a week.Dave Winer says "I don't want to start a site hosting business." As far as I can tell, there is no way to "upgrade" to keep a weblogs.com site; the best you could do is move to a different provider.
Or entirely not like that at all.
- c -
Personal pages with no content of intrest to anyone have been around since the early days of the web. However they existed in their own little corner and were rarely found by search engines. Blogs because of the incestious linking to each other are found and are just another chunk of noise getting in the way.
Not that I hate blogs. It is just, ugh. I thought I found the information I wanted and instead I am on some whiners site. What a waste of time and bandwidth.
Now if only google could filter out blogs. Then all the personal sites would go back to their own little corner of the net and I wouldn't know anything about them. Of course if this is done then a lot of bloggers would whine because they would miss the accidental visits and see that in reality nobody wants to read about their thoughts. You gotta be intrestting to have something intrestting to say and most people simply are not.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
No, really. I bought a computer for $110 from Computer Renaisance that runs linux with no problem. Installing apache with perl was nothing using apt-get, and Greymatter took probably like an hour to get working. And that was my first time ever doing anything outside of "THIS IS MY COOL HOMEPAGE! THIS IS A TREE (picture of a tree) IF YOU CLICK IT YOU CAN EMAIL ME!!!" websites really. And most of the bloggers are ultra cool anti-microsoft people aren't they?
And if you have a blog thats popular enough for you to get enough traffic for your cable provider to get mad, wouldn't you already be on a paid host anyway?
March 1997, one of my little weekly columns (didn't call them "blogs" back then) gets a mention in Us. Unfortunately I'd been hosting it in donated /~username space, and right after the magazine puts the blurb to bed, the owners of the bookstore hosting my site decide they don't want to run a server anymore.
No warning, no forwarding, no nothing. I have everything backed up, so I register a domain, get hosting, and my site's back online within a few days... only at another address. I'm running around trying to update my entries at all the major search engines, posting to appropriate newsgroups, just trying to get the word out that my columns had moved.
Then Us comes out, glowing little blurb recommending my column... and the *old* URL. My first major national press and no one can find me.
That is the most insidious part of what Winer has done. He has separated all those bloggers from their readers, leaving them no way to leave a forwarding address. Anyone who doesn't backup their content takes their chances, but how do you backup your audience?
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Winer offered to host this stuff for free. He OFFERED (and to be fair, actually did it.)
/. can self-righteously complain that the people pissed off are "just whiners" - which makes the morons on /. "just whiners" by the same logic - they're whining about someone else's perfectly justified behavior.
People took him up on it (braindead though that might be since it should have been obvious to him and them it couldn't go on forever.)
Then he shuts it down WITH NO PRIOR NOTICE.
At best, that makes him an asshole (unless it was literally an emergency that prevented him from notifying anyone at all. Was that the case? Doesn't say so.) At worst, it makes him a major asshole.
Now the morons on
Bottom line: You get what you pay for (sometimes) - and you never get what you don't pay for (usually).
Which doesn't justify being an asshole - always.
Being right justifies being an asshole - as I demonstrate here.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
That seems to be a pretty common opinion of Dave. yet countless people decided it was a good idea to host their blog on a site operated by what would seem to be, by accounts like this, a madman!! Why on earth would you not expect your blog to just vanish someday, or have your words of wisdom turned into latin or something? Why would you host a blog there at all?
If the answer starts with "well, it was free..." then you get everything you deserve. I have plenty of my own "Well, it was {free,cheap}" experiences and although I grumbled about it a little in the end I could only blame my own human nature for trying to get something for nothing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I notice you posted that AC. Is that because you can't really put belief in your own words?
I don't care how much you try to explain the quote away as "metaphor", it's simply not appropriate to craft a metaphor for information loss from real people dying, especially in large numbers in a tragic manner. That's just plain rude and shows a lack of respect for those dead and the families still here. I imagine you could call up one of the "silenced" bloggers on the phone or even find some of them blogging elsewher eon the same day. Compare and contrast with a wife or child or husband who will never see a loved one again. Oh, you can't.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Responsibilities come with giving a gift, so that the giver is no longer free, but instead also gives away some of their own freedom, and is bound by the recipients to give them more.
Do these responsibilities really come with giving a gift? I'm not sure.
But look at the reaction.
No offense taken. I'm a programmer, and half the people I see in this line of work are incompetent burger-flippers. Who only got hired because some "smart" beancounter thought he's cleverly saving money by hiring the cheapest monkeys. Except they have mental trouble even tying their shoelaces, forwarding emails or cutting and pasting.
(True story, and I swear to God I'm not making it up: every month I have to clean up my overflowing inbox at work, because some "programmer" mailed me a 24 bit full-screen screenshot to show me an error message displayed in telnet, or in whatever log viewer they were using. It takes work to teach them to copy and past that error message. What took the cake, though, was seeing an attached 24 bit full-screen screenshot of... an email in Outlook. Poor man's substitute for "forward".)
I would, however, disaggree with the assessment that even these are "just above" field service and helpdesk. You haven't seen the service and helpdesk, then. _Some_ of those make the "programmers" above look like brilliant geniuses.
The proper IT people here gave us PCs with Matrox drivers installed... and a Nvidia card. And the wrong IDE drivers. Anything except installing from the CD with the backed-up standard NT4 config is _miles_ over their head.
If you call them because your Outlook '97 (corporate standard, you see) crapped and now throws an error message on startup, as happened to a couple of co-workers, they'll want to format the HDD and reinstall that holy standard CD.
I swear to God I'm not making it up.
So basically, yeah, I'm with you there. Just because someone's job says "programmer", doesn't automatically mean that they can actually program or administer a computer. Or what a backup is.
Don't get me wrong. I also do know a whole bunch of good competent programmers. But also about 3 times as many whose only merit was being shameless enough to lie to an incompetent HR droid.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
He explains in his audio that 'people don't read long essays', implying that they'll listen to some guy rambling on about his life story, insterspaced with coughs and---woe is me!---sniffles. Poor Dave, he obviously doesn't understand people (quick show of hands: which is faster to go through, email or voicemail? I thought so.)
If he had only written down his thoughts, then I would have bothered reading them, instead of cutting off his cute diatribe after a few minutes. I can read much faster than he can say "um, ... well, ... um ... "
Yeah, right.
he's basically saying that sometime after July 1, when he's moved and settled in and he gets around to it, he will make them available. that doesn't exactly sound like any kind of reassurance. ..which is more than he has any obligation to do, I might point out.
He was giving people something for nothing, and you're getting all indignant because he's decided to quit. Get over yourself.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I think people may have missed the significant point of how this happened. They wouldn't have sent out a notice about impending closure from Userland because they weren't planning to close them at that point. Dave was planning to migrate them and keep them going. It was only after they had been moved that it was discovered how he had underestimated the amount of server power needed. The new home couldn't handle running them, much less the load it would have been hit with if everyone had been notified and started backing up their sites. It was unfortunate, but at least he's setting up a way for people to get their content back. I can't believe people are so upset about losing access to their hobby for a couple weeks. It's a hobby someone else pays for, too.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds