justanotherfan wrote:You know, about an hour ago I thought about that, and about how assinine it would be for them to silently go bankrupt taking everyone's website content with them. I imagine that telling people to backup their content within a day would cause investors to panic, but only for a day on a sinking ship. I figured a hosting company wouldn't do that. Deleting all content intentionally is the antithesis of what hosting companies and administrators do. I can't think of anyone I know that would pay for a hosting service whose employees had deleted all subscriber content without warning at their last job. Maybe they thought Technology was over, and decided to start new careers in Fire and Hunting
. You're probably right though.
I'm not 100% certain on this part, but I'm pretty sure that website administrators did not have to pay for hosting from EdgeNetwork. Rather, it was like the pseudo-symbiosis of the Gamespy/IGN-type "Media Networks", where website admins needed a place to put their content, and the Network hosted them in return for the advertising revenue it brings them (the sites have links to other parts of the Network and ads that the host controls). However, even with storage and bandwidth being relatively cheap these days, it's still more than can be paid for by ad revenue from low-traffic/old sites without having a steady supply of hot new sites to acquire.
That, of course, is undone by the fact that storage and bandwidth are relatively cheap, so hosting from a commercial Web host supplemented by Google ads is more attractive to many potential site admins than it was back in Ye Olde Internets when this "Network"-type clustering was the only way anyone would ever hear of your site. With the new atmosphere of *cringe*
Web 2.0 *uncringe*, where everyone and their cats are on roughly 8 million social networking sites and have hundreds of obsessing neophiles waiting for updates on daily minutiae, the Internet is no longer a void where nobody can hear you scream.
The danger of this sort of thing was mostly mitigated by incorporating download sites into Media Networks, as having a site and hosting large downloads are two very separate ballparks, and thus, everyone wanting those files gets funnelled through the download site of your chosen Network where you have plenty of time to look at their ads. More recently, even that hasn't been enough to offset costs and most of these download sites have started pushing paid accounts and restricting unpaid use.
You may notice that EdgeFiles did NOT do this. And now EdgeNetwork is dead. But I guess they still have their integrity...?
The rest of this is just commentary on my part, but it seems like this is the classic clash between staying successful financially and staying well-liked. People start companies with noble intentions and ties to a community and suddenly find themselves having to choose between eating Ramen Noodles in their car or "selling out".
Let's face it, as consumers, and, well... as people, I suppose, we are generally incredibly opinionated. We have no qualms at all about "filling in" any details we don't know about something (or assume said details to not exist) and giving an ultimate judgement as soon as we hear something about it. Then we hold onto that opinion so closely that if someone else were to hint at a conflicting opinion we might get angry and hold onto the opinion tighter, never allowing for the possibility in our own minds that we might be wrong. So, when we hear something about Foo company starting to charge Bar dollars for a Baz subscription, which used to be free, we do not care in the least what motivated that action or how necessary it was. All we care about is that we want Baz, which means we have to pay money, and we don't like paying money, so we don't like Foo company (of course, we also
like to play favourites, so we arbitrarily pick and choose who to hate/defend zealously).
The companies whose leadership can stomach making self-absorbed consumers angry make money and get another turn. For example, Gamespy and IGN's recent merge, which was by no means popular. The companies whose leadership isn't willing to compromise their image or their naïveté about the business world eventually reach the bottom of their wallet and realise that, oh wait, I guess this didn't get filled as fast as we thought it would, looks like we have to delay wages this month....
I don't know if that's what happened to EdgeNetwork, but they really didn't have a lot to make money from, and sooner or later you need to pay people.
In closing,
I think this sums it up very nicely (thanks,
Jim).