zlacker

>>waxpan+(OP)
I'm amazed by the number of people who trust websites like this with their memories/diaries etc. I mean, I understand why, there's an expectation when you start with these sites they'll be around forever - most people don't have the time, the knowledge or the desire to "do it themselves" - When livejournal was all the rage I decided to do it myself with Postnuke, then (and still!) Drupal. Going on 24 years now. That said, LiveJournal is still going, but owned by a Russian company I think, and it could turn off tomorrow.

I guess the flipside is, if I die tomorrow and then there's a PHP error on my website, no one's ever going to know how to fix it. So my memories and diary entries die as well. My "fix" for that is to export the ~2400 diary entires every few months into one massive PDF file.

Edit: I understand why this is being downvoted, I just want to clarify that I didn't mean the opening sentence to read as if people who trust 3rd party websites to their hosting were silly/dumb, though I realise now that's how it scans. What I should have said was "It's very unfortunate and a sad state of the current Internet that people trust websites like this..."

>>muppet+EU
That is the main takeaway from all these. The lesson is not that venture capital ruined it. But that eventually, at some point, either the founder or circumstances change the thing. The one permanent here is that it's bit on a digital network. By definition not permanent. And so people run into this again and again and still don't believe that XYZ might be next.

But it is, XYZ is their business platform, their social media network, their journals, their photo hoster, their "lifetime membership", etc. I ran into this all the time with clients. They would worry about what happens to their consultant, but never to their infrastructure.

So for businesses: have a plan B, and have usable archives / backups. And for individuals, have a plan B, and have usable archives / backups.