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."

Not a Troll (for once...)

[imadork (226897)]

So, netcraft confirmed that *weblogs are dying?

New Word Coined!

[Rick and Roll (672077)]

"ogs" - which refers to all types of online journalism, including:

1. blogs
2. plogs
3. moblogs

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.

TOS

[BodyCount07 (260070)]

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.

Re:TOS

[EvanED (569694)]

"It would've cost him so much to give people a couple of days to get their shit in order?"

Actually, maybe. I don't know his hosting situation, but if even a quarter of the people had gone to back up their posts, that's a significant amount of extra traffic. Notice would have probably been have to be given out at least a week in advance to avoid a massive rush.

Re:TOS

[JPriest (547211)]

Yes, but that cost would likely be offset when people read that only the free accounts were nuked. Non-free accounts were not nuked, so many of the free users probably would have been willing to pay to upgrade their service in order to keep it.

There are no paid accounts

[Wesley Felter (138342)]

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.

Re:TOS

[TeraCo (410407)]

Well, it's easy to talk about costs when they aren't YOUR costs to be paying, isn't it.

Re:TOS

[squidinkcalligraphy (558677)]

And it's even easier to talk about costs when you are part of the force that is increasing them as we speak: I refer to the slashdot effect.

Re:TOS

[prockcore (543967)]

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)

Backups

[by Anonymous Coward]

Why would you trust any hosting company to keep the only copy of your data, if it were all that important to you?

Re:Backups

[stilwebm (129567)]

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 [harvard.edu] [MP3 audio post he made].

Re:Backups

[ziggy_zero (462010)]

The real question is, where are bloggers going to go to whine about this????

Newsflash...

[WIAKywbfatw (307557)]

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.

Re:Newsflash...

[pongo000 (97357)]

Now imagine this was SourceForge...

Re:Newsflash...

[FrYGuY101 (770432)]

As a MINOR participant in one SF project, I'll gladly point out that I keep a local copy of the source. If SF went tits-up (God forbid), I'd be quite saddened, but I wouldn't blame SF if I also lost my copy of the source. It'd be MY damn fault for not taking precautions.

Re:Newsflash...

[geoffspear (692508)]

Especially since Sourceforge points out to anyone starting a new project, very clearly, that they are responsible for backing up all of their project's data.

Re:Newsflash...

[Huogo (544272)]

I pay for hosting, and I still do backups at least once/week (mainly for the database backups). Anyone who keeps anything on the 'net should know that its an unstable place, and thing can dissapear at a moment's notice. I don't trust anything to be kept securely to the web, and no one else should either.

Crystal Ball

[by Anonymous Coward]

I can forsee quite a few people complaining about this in their weblogs.

Oh...wait...

Ironic

[shadowmatter (734276)]

Having your blogging service totally shut you out without notice finally seems like the perfect thing to blog about.

- sm

Re:Ironic

[Rolo Tomasi (538414)]

Blog to the hand, cause the server ain't listening.

You know what they say...

[by Anonymous Coward]

Jesus saves and backs up nightly!

I feel a disturbance in the force.

[hayden (9724)]

It's as though a couple of thousand babbling idiots were suddenly silenced.

Wrong.

[Eric_Cartman_South_P (594330)]

It's as though a couple of thousand babbling idiots were suddenly silenced.

No no, Slashdot is still up. :P

Thankfully not LiveJournal

[by Anonymous Coward]

At least LiveJournal didn't shut down without notice. Otherwise we'd all be up tonight digging mass graves for disfranchised teenagers all over the world.

Re:Thankfully not LiveJournal

[mlk (18543)]

Doesn't an N Sync CD cost about $25?

Last I checked, buying an N Sync CD would cost you your soul.
And your pride if anyone ever found out.

Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[katsushiro (513378)]

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.

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[Dun Malg (230075)]

talking about their latest dream with N'Sync and a pony

I have the n'sync-with-a-pony dream all the time. I should start a blog about it.

wrong

[That's Unpossible! (722232)]

I don't understand the level of hostility against blogs. No one's putting a gun to your head and making you read them.

Apparantly you haven't tried to use Google lately.

Why we hate blogs

[SmallFurryCreature (593017)]

The web is a wonderfull things in wich countless bits of information are there to be found. Except it is getting harder and harder to find them. I can easily mentally filter out the fake link sites from google results. Porn is easy too. Shopping sites I learned to regonize and avoid as well. But blogs are harder because there are so many of them and the sentences shown by google actually seem to relate to the subject I am searching for.

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.

Choice quotes from the wired article

[beforewisdom (729725)]

From: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,63856,00. htm

In an audio message posted late Monday explaining his reasons for the shutdown, Winer cited the financial costs of hosting the sites, technical difficulties in moving the blogs to a new server, stress and personal health issues as the reasons for the sudden shutdown.

Winer, who has offered free hosting to bloggers for the past four years, has promised to make exportable copies of blog contents available to the blogs' owners at their request. He says it will take at least two weeks to provide copies of the blogs' contents.

"I just did the best I could," said Winer, in his audio message. "This is not a company here ... this is a person. To expect company-type service ... that's just not going to happen."

The first reaction on reading the news is to assume the guy was being a dick in not giving notice when he saw this coming.

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

To all saying users should backup their blogs...

[tlambert (566799)]

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

Re:To all saying users should backup their blogs..

[k4_pacific (736911)]

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.

Manila supports backup

[Wesley Felter (138342)]

Manila (the software used on weblogs.com) has an export feature [userland.com] for exactly this purpose. (I just backed up my site right now. Luckily it wasn't on weblogs.com.)

Dave Winer has written in the past about why it's import for Web apps to export data [scripting.com]: "So since we're going to have competition, I believe we must take extra steps to guarantee that there's no customer lock-in. It's even more important in the age of the Web when the user might not even have a copy of their own data. One of the cardinal requirements of this market, even before we try to get the UIs compatible, is an export function that leaves un-rendered text and data on the user's hard disk in a format readable by software that's available at a reasonable or no cost."

It sucks but it happens

[wuice (71668)]

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.

Dave Winer

[redtail1 (603986)]

For those of you with better things to do than follow weblog community matters, Dave Winer is a narcissistic asshole who will do almost anything to get attention including revising history, throwing temper tantrums, slamming other people (but later denying he did it) and taking his ball and going home. He jealously guards technologies he helped create and hinders any efforts to help them grow from pet projects into community standards because he doesn't want to lose the spotlight. Most people who know him have learned to ignore him because complaining about his petulant behavior is pointless.

There. Now you're up to speed.

Health issues?!

[YouHaveSnail (202852)]

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 [editthispage.com], 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.

Listen to audio notes

[iamacat (583406)]

It's much more informative than the web page. The guy basically says he is too sick to maintain the server and will export the blogs on request. For me, it sounds like people should either a) say thanks for a freeby they had for a while, export their stuff and move on or b) offer to host all or a portion of the sites and provide a legal privacy guarantee for moving the accounts.

Something that slashdot owners should consider, huh?

I set up this server...

[jerkychew (80913)]

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's Lying: backups would have been easy

[sakusha (441986)]

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.

Disproportionate much?

[Complicity (30481)]

From the 'enraged' link:

Last night was a 9/11 of sorts for the weblogs.com bloggers.

Or entirely not like that at all.

Re:Umm...

[EvanED (569694)]

If he was having problems already I'm not sure a mad rush of 3000 people trying to back up their data would have exactly helped...

Re:Umm...

[rimu guy (665008)]

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 [rimuhosting.com]

Re:Not any more then normal traffic really..

[cbreaker (561297)]

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.

Re:Not any more then normal traffic really..

[Just Some Guy (3352)]

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.

These are blogs. The owners are the ones reading them.

Locking out the owners and only allowing guests would probably cut the bandwidth usage by about 95%.

Re:Umm...

[sakusha (441986)]

Fundraising isn't the issue. Winer's a millionaire, he just sold his house in CA. According to the Wired Magazine biography of Winer, he paid $2 million for a house in an exclusive neighborhood, next to Joan Baez's house. Winer is sitting on millions of bucks, it's not like he couldn't afford to pay for hosting. He just decided he no longer wanted to, so he killed the blogs of everyone who wasn't his buddy (i.e. Searls). So if you haven't sucked up to Winer sufficiently, your blog is toast. Such are the tribulations of dealing with millionaire dilletantes.

Winer is freaking out. His "fellowship" at Berkman is over, he's got no job and nobody wants him around anymore, even his sycophants are no longer willing to help him find his next gig.

Re:Umm...

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wired article

[skaffen42 (579313)]

From the Wired article: "I just have my fingers crossed that my girlfriend gets her blog back," said software programmer Tom Gortell. "She feels like someone just sucked out her brains. I don't get it, it's just an online journal, right? But she feels like her entire life has been stolen."

The guy works as a programmer and he never told her to make backups? And then he tells Wired that he doesn't get why she is upset. Somebody better e-mail him the number of a good florist.

But seriously, he should have told her to make backups. Free service. You get what you pay for. What more can you say?

Re:could it be.. no.

[cbreaker (561297)]

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.

Re:Hmm...

[metamatic (202216)]

Who needs a couple of hundred lines of anything, let alone PHP?

Just download blosxom. 100 lines of code. Works with any ISP, even if you don't have CGI.

Re:before the winer-hating starts...

[RedWizzard (192002)]

Doc Searls (one of the bloggers affected) provides a bit more info.

Um, Doc Searls is quite clearly not one of the bloggers affected - his blog is still up. Clearly he's got special treatment, but how does that help the 2999 other bloggers who have no chance of seeing their data for another two weeks?