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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."
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.
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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.
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].
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.
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)
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.
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.
"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
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.
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