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."
Seems more and more people are turning against blogs. :-(
Kinda reminds me of this Kuro5hin article.
Now imagine this was SourceForge...
He has 3000 people using the service. It would have taken them some time to sign up. He would have had ample info about the cost of running the service and providing support for it.
I can only deduce that Mr. Winer's personal circumstances have changed dramatically, and that is what is causing the problem.
And I agree with the grandfather post. There should have been warning about the service change. He should have let people know they had a week or a month to move things off the server. There would have been an increase in server load. But it would have been manageable.
---
Yep, we host blogs
Well, let's suppose you're Dave Winer. Stay with me here.
You know that no matter what you do to close down the site, you will be flamed and people will hate you. This is true for anybody, not just Dave Winer. Imagine if slashdot closed up one day. I bet the non-paying slashdotters would complain the loudest.
And you know the traffic will go UP immediately.
You just don't want the hassle.
Also, remember you're Dave Winer and you have Dave Winer's.. let's say "unique" personality.
The only logical thing to do is close it up, wait a few days for the dust to settle, and then deal with the sycophants, leaving the rest to rot.
This happened to hatelife.org a few weeks ago as well, and there were a lot of people hating life a lot more than they ordinariuly would have been to. Basically Steve, the maintainer said his time with hatelife was done. People pissed and moaned about his canning hatelife and before I knew it, hatelife was taken off.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
The users have varying level of backups, but the biggest issue is that no one can find the new blog now. The weblogs.com domain was integral to these blogs, much like blogger.com, typepad.com, etc. The weblogs were found at hostnames like booknotes.hammock.com, rex.weblogs.com, delphi.weblogs.com, etc. Users very much could have used an opportunity to say what their new URL was. Dave Winer decided that was too much work [MP3 audio post he made].
Why not leave the sites online, but with some authentication turned on (Basic HTTP auth)?
This way online the blog authors could access the system and get their data out. The load on the server should stay reasonable.
Note: I decided not to call them "logs", because that word has already gained use online and offline, so we need a way to distinguish which ones are online.
From the sound of things, I doubt that the guy who was hosting everything would have much of a problem handing over the domain to somebody who'd be willing to put the server back up or at least provide redirection to the new homes of the sites.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Instead of giving plenty of notice so every person would attempt to download their entire blog, and probably cause him a ton of traffic - he announced it out of the blue.
As you can see from the main page, there's roughly only 100 people that have applied to have their blog emailed back to them - I guess the others just can't be bothered. Those 100 are probably the only ones who will actually do anything with their blog.
Everyone can say this guy should have given notice etc, but the fact remains it was a free service. If he didn't offer to send the blogs back to people on request then that would be quite ignorant, but he did offer - something he probably didn't have to do.
"I am really at loss as to why /. readers who are not directly affected have to flame this guy.
Well, because Dave has one of those nice-guy-until-he-forgets-to-take-his-meds personalities. If you catch one of his bizarre backhands once or twice (don't forget he's done more than just Manila), you don't only tend to stay away from him, you also tend to remember him uncharitably.
So he's getting flamed more than the average joe would.
From the Wired piece, "People have been really afraid to discuss this," said a New York blogger who asked that his name be withheld. "There's a lot of concern that any nasty comments will result in Dave not getting around to making a copy of your blog. I think a lot of the politeness and 'We love you, Dave!' sentiments that you're seeing in some Web posts is just pure paranoia."
That's no joke. That's a direct result of Dave's past behaviour.
If it's still in the same rack as it was 6 months ago, that is. I used to work for a web hosting company that had some co-lo space in a hosting facility. We set up 2 of the servers for weblogs.com as well as another server for another site. I never met Dave, but did everything through his partner. His partner was a super-nice guy, Linux afficianado, and slashdot reader. Kinda sad that they ran out of money.
(I have to be a bit vague on the details due to NDAs and such... Sorry for not including any specifics)
Well shoot. I've already doled out 3 mod points here, but I'm going to give them up so I can post. Apologies to the 3 people who see their nice "+1 Informative" mods vanish.
Look, I think your post (and many of the posts here) are overly harsh. They should be harsh to an extent, because something bad has happened that didn't have to happen. Dave made a mistake. But to rip into the guy as if we're entitled? C'mon.
For those of you haven't bothered to listen to Dave's audio blog, he explains exactly the criticisms leveled here. Does the /. readership understand that Dave hasn't worked at Userland for years? He saw Userland wanted to dump the blogs and tried to move it to his own private server. This worked poorly. In the audio blog he explains that if he put the server up as-is and gave people 2 weeks to download the sites, it would have hammered his server, which was already in use for other things. You might say he should have fixed the server, and his response is already in the blog -- it would have taken a big time investment, and he's not healthy enough to do it.
I'm not saying he doesn't deserve some criticism. If you listen to his audio blog, you'll get the clear impression that he's tired of trying to help people who act as hyper-critical (about free stuff!) as some of our Slashdot posters. That's his right of course, but he could exit more gracefully, I'm sure. And posting a 3.5 meg audio blog has to hammer his server almost as much as 3000 site backups would. So there's weird stuff. But the real issue ought to be Userland. Why couldn't they host the site for 2 more weeks? They have healthy employees. They might have even been able to turn it into a business opportunity if they made it easy to migrate to Manila or another paid service.
Give the rich boy a break. He tried to do right, it didn't work out, and now he wants to stop. OK. Ask him for your blog back, and when you get it, stay the hell away from centralized servers run by a single entity. Host your own. Use my low-end phpBB Blog, or Bloxom, or anything else. Some of these blog tools are even easy.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Winer argued that it would have been impossible to perform backups, it would have overwhelmed the system if he'd preannounced the closure, it would have killed his system from overload.
I call Bullshit.
Notice this handy feature on the Harvard weblog host site created by Winer:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/weblogBackup
You just submit the request, and your backup runs overnight, presumably it's a cron job to tar all your files (or the Windoze equivalent, since Winer seems stuck on Windoze platform).
So Winer was lying when he said it would have been impossible to offer backups without shutting down the whole system like he did. Software was already written to perform backups. He could have just made the blog webspaces read-only, so blog authors could no longer post new content, but the blogs could still be available to the public, until they got backed up. This transition was handled extremely poorly, it must have been a deliberate decision to do it this way. Dave apparently WANTED to piss everyone off.
You don't remember the fundraiser Wikipedia had to go through several months ago to buy new hardware? They ended up raising the $20K they needed and then some...
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Well, it's easy to talk about costs when they aren't YOUR costs to be paying, isn't it.
The company I work for used to be an ISP (as well as many other things). We decided the ISP (dialup and DSL) wasn't making money so we sold it.
But we had the common courtesy to set up forwards for all 30k of our subscriber's email, and keep their personal websites up and home directories for over a year.
Even to this day, we still host local non profits' websites for free (we don't accept new ones, but we'll continue to host the ones we did accept back in our ISP days)
You seem to be operating under some mistaken assumptions. Winer still owns Userland. He is being disingenuous when he says he no longer runs Userland. Maybe he doesn't hold the official title of CEO, but he still owns the company, and it is operated under his direction.
You also seem to be assuming that this hostility towards Winer is unjustified because he gave out these services for free. I assure you from personal experience that Winer treats you like shit even if you're a paying customer.
You also seem to believe it when Dave says he's getting out of the hosting business. Wrong again. He's just killing off the FREE weblogs (with the exception of his suck-up buddies like Searls). His servers still host the paid customers of Radio Userland, hosted on radio.weblogs.com, so he can't dump all of weblogs.com like he claims he's doing. The big question is why did he have all those websites moved to HIS server if they were paid customers of Userland?
You also seem to think these criticisms are unnecessarily harsh. I disagree. Winer is notorious for baiting people, then editing the exchange of messages. His usual tactic is to say something offensive, then someone responds in a similarly hotheaded manner, then Winer edits his original remark to something innocuous, so it seems like the response is a completely flaming response to a polite remark. So it is not too surprising that people jump at the chance to respond to Winer's insanity in a forum that isn't controlled by Winer. These remarks are quite civil by Winer's standards of conduct.
that's not what he was refering to...he was refering to the tendacy for the hard drive containing your data to find itself being auctioned off after the company that used to own it went under....expect it to happen about 6 months to a year after the company is formed.
Advanced users are users too!
For an example of this, just look at this thread.
You don't need fancy software to write in a blog. Jeffery Zeldman used to write his blog exclusively in a text editor, in fact! I think Tim Bray and Norman Walsh use still use Emacs to do the majority of their writing (augmented with some client-side scripts) before uploading their content, but I may be wrong.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
Well, in his blog he says, "I have not worked there for over two years." If he's actually lying or stretching the truth a whole lot, then you're right, he's a dick. If he's telling the truth and you're just so pissed at him that you have to get one more pot-shot in, then you're a dick. Somebody's a dick, I don't know who. But the point is that it doesn't matter anymore. Why? Because he's getting out. OK? If you're so upset with his handling of free accounts, well, congratulations. Dave is marginalizing himself and providing a perfect opportunity for others to come in and do better. So cheer up. Get your blog back on July 1st, wave goodbye to him, and let him walk away.
So what if he has paid hosting? Take your business elsewhere! Why stress yourself out interacting with someone who "treats you like shit even if you're a paying customer"? Stop being a paying customer!
Fair enough. But it's also fair for other people to wonder where exactly the problem is. Free or paid, the solution is in front of you.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Seems to be a little revisionism here: the corporations built the internet, regular people can tag along as long as their efforts are profitable? Did I miss the memo?
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
When ePhysician.com turned out it's corporate lights it kept the servers running (a testament to the developers there -- the system ran over 6 months without any maintenance and the only way people found out the company was liqudated was when they attempted to add new users, delete existing users or update pharmacy fax numbers and no one ever returned a phone call). One day my company received a call from a prestigious ePhysician customer (the head of psychiatry at an Ivy League School) based on our company's website being linked as a eP partner; the call was directed to me as I was the CTO of our company (CTO and the "reboot monkey"; it was a small company and I really was the lead web app developer but someone needed to fill the C' role). The caller was trying to reach eP and I told him they were out of business and all their assets were on the table for a fraction of their cost. He was shocked and explained that he needed his records for legal reasons (prescription data is critical to prescribers). I told him to quickly and carefully use the standard report tools to pull the data down for archiving.
I develop ASP-style applications. Never would I want to put my customers in a situation like ePhysicians did or Dave Winer has. However, there is still the very real risk that your data on others servers will suddenly not be available to you. This is true of Hotmail, Yahoo!Mail, Source Forge, GMail.google.com, your ISP, your bank, or my stuff.
Watch out for your interests and don't assume.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
If he had announced that he was closing free accounts, they would have slammed him HARD while they backed up their stuff, then ran off
It depends on how much effort was involved, not just to export the data and import it somewhere (performing whatever conversion is required) but to communicate the new URL to everyone.
A modest fee would most likely have been paid, especially if new functionality came with pay accounts. Look at Livejournal - you can sign up for free, but paying users get more features. In fact Slashdot could learn a lot from Livejournal.
"Only in such a sick culture could the terms of a contract take precedence over common courtesy. It would've cost him so much to give people a couple of days to get their shit in order?"
You can also look at TOS vs. common courtesy the other way around:
No matter what the TOS said, if you are/were getting free service, and this service is provided by an individual whose circumstances have changed and are outside his control, use your common courtesy and accept that your blog is now gone.
Like other have said:
1. if your blog is so important, why didn't you back it up?
2. why trust an individual (or a company) with your precious data and trust them with the only copy of your data
Simpy
consideration - but also goodwill. Business runs a lot on goodwill - i.e. can I pay this bill later? sure, we know and trust you - that sort of thing. In this case, Dave had 2 choices: give a warning or nuk'em. With a warning, he may have gained customers. He would still have lost some good will but by going nuclear, and with some shabby *audio* instructions, he's lost a whole lot more goodwill, gained lots of hostile reviews etc. This isn't good business - but isn't this joker some kind of half-arsed academic these days?
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Yep. Looks like loyalty just went out the window.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Dave Winer has provided a portion of his network resources to the Internet community at large for several years, manifested by our (now terminated) ability to host a blog for free on his systems. Note that I'm not attempting to portray Dave as an altruistic fellow, although I do in fact think he's a great guy. We can't escape the fact that he achieved a significant amount of promotion for Manilla in trade for our no-cost use of his system. I guarantee you that over the term of the arrangement, he gained far more from the deal in mindshare than he spent in bandwidth.
Unfortunately, nothing in this world is static. People are still getting older, stocks go up and down, and Dave's life (both personal and business, however little separation there may be between the two) isn't exempt from this rule. Before we rush to cry foul at his decision, let's look at some background information:
(1) Dave Winer is widely recognized as an Internet communication pioneer, having been an early designer of a useful system for letting people people manage online content. Depending on your current needs and budget, there may be better products out there, but his company's work remains relevant.
(2) The whole Manilla concept borrowed from earlier ideas, and became a model that others would follow in turn when they developed other CMS environments. This indicates a protracted period of skilled effort on Dave's part. Which leads us to the conclusion that...
(3) Dave Winer is most likely an intelligent man who shows every sign of continuing to live in a fair manner. His recent statements on the issue at hand seem well thought out and polite, which leads me to believe the health problems he references aren't related to mental disease. If his mind is still intact, he probably had very good reasons for forgoing public notification. We should remind ourselves that...
(4) Although the TOS for this hosting most likely hold the responsible parties harmless in the event of service discontinuance, there is always the possibility of some squirrely blogger getting notions of litigation in a moment of emotional weakness. Unspecified damages for emotional pain and suffering due to inability to dredge up the past by perusing their blog, or some other such title. It's unlikely. but possible for America's rather litigious populace. Remember the Fast Food Makes Us Obese lawsuits.
Remember, attorneys always give the same opening advice to their clients: Never admit culpability, and try not to say anything at all without first passing it through Big_Law_Firm.pl for content filtering. Even then, it's usually best to use Pricey_PR_Group.php to speak publically about your actions. Reference the Santa Cruz Operation for mastery of this art.
To sum it all up, let the inner Libertarian (no emotion, just the concept) in you shine by Making Daily Backups of anything important. A few lines of bash or perl scripting with a dash of UNIX utils can prevent years of therapy and rehab. As an added bonus, you get the ability to feel good about yourself by contributing your techniques to the community while you deposit checks from your clients who just *love* your new online backup service.
Thus, personal responsibility helps us keep smart people out of the field of dentisty by preventing excessive gnashing of teeth. Less demand in that field equals more folks to give us free hosting services, right? More personally, since everyone wants to feel special in their own way, I feel special knowing my dentist doesn't feel inspired to name his next luxury car after me. It ain't much, but anything that helps me sleep better is well worth the effort.
People are cheap.
But what do paid users get that free users don't? What is it that drives a free user to upgrade? That's what needs to be studied to improve your conversion rate.
Some of Livejournal's stuff is seemingly trivial - for example, paid users can upload a bigger selection of icons to attach to each post. But, it turns out that a lot of Livejournal users are willing to pay in order to have the "perfect" icon on hand for whatever they're posting about. This doesn't even increase the bandwidth bill, since an icon would be attached anyway, and it only modestly increases the storage bill (they're only 100x100 JPEGs). Things like this mean they don't have to bother with banner ads at all.
First, I notice that many of these posts say that "3000 bloggers" have lost their sites. This is just not true. I know that at least three of these sites were mine. I created them for various purposes, they ran their course, and when I was through with them I let them go to seed. I'm sure that I'm not the only one to do so. I lost nothing when they were shut down. In fact, my contact information was not current, so Winer would not have been able to contact me if he had tried. I'll bet that I'm not alone in THAT respect, either.
/. posts from people saying that they lost their own sites when Winer pulled the plug. (Although I have to say that the posts here are downright sedate compared to the people at http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/002739.h tml, who seriously need to go back on their meds.)
Second, as many people pointed out, these accounts didn't cost me a dime, and they didn't make Winer a dime. There were no ads on the sites. Winer didn't harvest my email to sell to spammers, and he didn't spam me myself. I got a hell of a lot more than Winer did. I got the use of his site for four years. I got the opportunity to experiment with weblogs. I got the use of a first-class weblogging system. Winer's software is far and away the best system that I've tried. The themes were professional and well-designed, the software was intuitive and a pleasure to use, and the response time was usually exceptional. Going from Userland to another system -- Blogger, for example -- was like going from OS X to Windows 3.1. (Brrrr.)
It was a free service that went on long after the Internet bubble burst and other free services disappeared. It was fun while it lasted. Could Winer have done a better job of weaning people off the system? Maybe. I don't know, and neither do you.
Oddly enough, I don't recall any
Um, No. Methinks someone doesn't get the joke.
The "understanding" user said it all. He got more than he 'didn't pay for'. Some people - like "enraged" act as if the world owes them something for free. Get a clue people - unless you actually pay for a service, you have not right what-so-ever to expect anything, including continued service.
Also worth noting, "understanding" is calm and rational. "enraged" is a whining snarling back-biting little bitch. For those of you considering provided an internet based service free of charge, think about the multitudes of "engrageds" out there.
People are cheap. If it wasn't for Google ads, I'd be dead in the water.
Great business lesson here - don't expect people to pay:
And make your money off of their greed - sell ads. Their laziness - sell extra space or options like backups, saving sent messages, etc.
So stop offering to them for free. I don't advertise at all and still have more than 28 people using my $5 per month email hosting deal. I've also discovered that people who pay a fair price for things are less likely to make fantastic demands than people who don't pay anything. Funny how that is.
Incidentally, there are plenty of things I do offer for free (my photos are in the public domain, for example, and I donate bandwidth to several projects). But since maintenance of my webserver depends on bandwidth being paid for, I don't screw around with free-hosting-for-everybody. All you're going to attract is dumb leeches who only know, only CARE, that they aren't going to pay a lot for that muffler.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
"...paid users are pretty steady at 28 - while the number of free signups has just crossed the 10,000 mark :/.
:))
People are cheap. If it wasn't for Google ads, I'd be dead in the water."
You touch the most important point for me to not pay, how do I know that you'll be running the service next month?
Why pay for a nice account when I could be greeted by a "No money/I'm fed up, f'ck off" anytime.
(Not meaning you specifically, don't be sad
Your saying Adwords actually produces income for you? Would you be able to say how much? Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org