When Web Services Turn Off

Posted on August 6, 2008
Filed Under Blogs |

Michael Totten is one of the more successful independent journalists and in addition to advertising revenue he relies on individual subscriptions in order to cover his travel and equipment costs. I had subscribed to his site last year and it wasn’t until he posted this note today that I realized I had not been seeing his monthly charges on my credit card.

A significant percentage of my travel expense income has come from those of you who signed up for recurring payments through a Blog Patron subscription. Blog Patron, unfortunately, has now closed. That cash flow has stopped up entirely.

[From Michael J. Totten: Help Keep the Dispatches Coming]

Blog Patron actually stopped accepting new signups last January and has since stopped processing transactions altogether. This caused me to think about my experiences with the very first blog hosting service I used many years ago, which after many service interruptions I discontinued in favor of Typepad, but the drop in traffic that resulted from changing domain names required at least 5-6 months of work to recover… and I again experienced that when I left Typepad for my own self hosted Wordpress blog.

The lesson is that the services you rely on in a SaaS world matter beyond the feature set and performance concerns, the viability of these service provider should be taken into account because there is no escrow or other contingency that will guarantee you a functioning service component long after the vendor dries up and blows away. In my case the issue was not vendor failure but rather being locked into a domain name, so less severe but still disruptive.

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