If you aren’t hosting your own content, you are playing with fire. It’s not a matter of “if” the service you rely on to store your stuff will shutdown, but “when”.
Bye-bye Posterous-hosted content
Word spread quickly today when it was announced that the popular blogging platform Posterous was shutting down effective April 30th, 2013. All blogs will go dark on that day and the content will be deleted. Users of the service have the option to grab an archive of their data before then that they can use to switch to another platform.
The loss of the Posterous service is one thing – a lot of people liked the easy posting system that Posterous provided. But I think the the real story here is that a ton of good content will simply be deleted come the end of April.
Free vs. paid
Fact: Paying for a service is no guarantee it’ll stay up forever (the company I work for ran a paid blogging service called Blogware and shuttered it last year, deleting many blogs and a ton of content).
My suggestion that you self-host extends to those currently using paid services like Squarespace or WordPress.com. Sure, Posterous was free and that created some additional challenges for the company, but even if it was a paid service, there would be nothing to prevent them from shuttering the service and leaving you high and dry.
Self-host is the only way to go
Here’s my suggestion – switch to your own platform and use your own domain name. Use WordPress or some other content management system (CMS), and host the site yourself for a few bucks a month. Don’t rely on service providers like Tumblr or even WordPress.com to keep you online forever.
Honestly, if you value the content you create and put online, then you need to be in control of your own stuff.
Here’s a question, do things NEED to be online in a certain place forever and ever? .
When we purchase and mortgage a house there’s no guarantee that house will exist forever and ever and ever. Stuff happens, sites go down. You move. Everybody moves. Change happens, especially on the web. Maybe it’s more important to ensure that whatever company with is stable enough for the length of time you need it to be and make sure it can spit out your content and maybe even your layout into neat little boxes you can take somewhere else.
I feel like the folks that are losing their Posterus content to the ether are not the types to really love the maintenance and responsibilities that can come with self hosted solutions. You can’t just set up a blog and let it be unless you make yourself a basic HTML site.
Now that’s something to think about, back to basics?
And for the love of god, back up your content! Personally nothing I write for the web solely exists online, recipe for disaster.
Sorry about typos and structure there.
Written from my iPhone at 6am :/
You are correct in pointing out that some content is ephemeral. Services like Instagram, Twitter, Posterous and others provide the solution to getting it online and shared for that short period of time until it doesn’t matter anymore.
I don’t think I’d care at all if Twitter only “saved” the last two weeks worth of my tweets. I downloaded my tweet archive the other day and 99% of what’s in there could be lost forever with no impact whatsoever.
On the other hand, blog posts and other less ephemeral content is what people should be concerned about saving for the long term. The issue with Posterous shutting down is that people didn’t treat it as just one of the places that their content should be stored.
I’ve been guilty of keeping my blog content in one place only in the past (the WordPress mySQL database). One mistake dropping tables one day was the end of that stuff forever.
Anyway…that’s a long way of saying that you are right – it’s probably not the end of the world if a lot of that Posterous content goes away forever. But if you want to keep your stuff ad infinitum, then you should keep it in more than one place and use services like Posterous as simply an easy way to get stuff online, not as the sole repository for your valuable content.