One of my pet projects oboeyasui.com is down. My service provider just turned it off without any notice. It is the first time I have had a site become so popular (apparently a million hits a day) that it got shut down. So I don’t know whether to feel extremely sad or just normal sad.

I can’t really argue with my service provider about turning it off, as the site was hosted on a shared server. I didn’t realise it had grown into such a monster. It would have been nice to have been given even a day of notice. Also they say that I need a $125 a month package to host it. Since the service was a free service (it didn’t even have ads) I don’t think that I can afford to pay out $1500 a year out of my own pockets. I do believe that other providers probably could host it for a lot less but still it wouldn’t be self-supporting. It’s a shame as it was a useful (and popular!) service that no-one else was providing.

Maybe one day it will live again. Let’s see…

PS. I’ve managed to keep a few shortcut urls going via manual .htaccess/apache rewrite rules going.

Posted on March 17th, 2008 by Ian Cheung
Filed under: Web Dev/IA