Cloud services seem to be dying at an ever increasing rate these days. A year or two things started for me with Delicious abandoning its popular bookmark service, followed by the announcement of Google to discontinue their RSS reader at some point this year. And now Wetpaint has decided to block the Prepaid Wireless Internet Access Wiki that they hosted on their servers for many years without giving any reasons or warning. Ouch.
Over the years Wetpaint seems to have changed its focus several times and today the hosted Wikis seem to be little more than an unloved project on the side for them. Already over the last year I have noticed that the server the Prepaid Wireless Internet Wiki is hosted on has become slower and slower to the point of being of little use. That should have been a warning sign and an incentive to think about moving the content. But I didn't…
Now the Wiki is blocked and there is no way to export the pages. Support on the Wetpaint Central site for such issues also seems to be zero and all my inquiries have been left unanswered so far. And so once more the lesson is: Never trust a cloud service, your data could be gone in the blink of an eye without any warning.
Too bad, the Wiki has proven to be quite useful over the years.
Thats the downside of “for free” 🙁
But it really is unprofessional – even as a free hoster – to not give a notice about the shut down in advance…