Every day, another hosted service dies. Hosting isn't new technology: The commercial Internet started when service providers, existing and newcomers, began offering ways for other companies to make material available without building infrastructure in house. The growth of Web 2.0 as a basic site requirement, coupled with cloud this-and-that (cloud computing, cloud services, cloud storage), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) all mean that individuals, institutions, and firms of all sizes find themselves with more resources stored elsewhere that they rely on for personal memories or business operations.
I'm a journalist, and I find myself seeing every more announcements, often abrupt, from companies that run out of funding, as well as from firms like Google and AOL that decide to cut lose ventures that aren't panning out. In some cases, subscribers have hours to move their data; in others, the data is either stored in proprietary structures or ones that can't be exported...or there's no time to move anything. It's gone.
This site is a bit of a public service. I'll put some advertising on to support my time and own costs in operation, but I'm primarily focused on making sure that people who want a one-stop shop to capture the dead pool of Web and Internet services can subscribe to this feed.
Unlike the macabre phrase used throughout the book Carter Beats the Devil about a woman who apparently perished at the hands of a cruel man, "She never died," I'm here to bring you the bad news. It's dead, Jim.
It died.
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