There’s a fundamental challenge in using a hosted platform for any kind of service:
CAN YOU TRUST THE “CLOUD” TO BE THERE?
Not just in terms of availability (i.e. uptime versus downtime), but also that the hosting platform will be around for a long time – or that you will be able to easily move to another platform.
We’ve reached that state of trust with hosted email servers and hosted web servers – those are now “commodities” and we can choose from zillions of providers. We embrace “the Internet Way” of “distributed and decentralized” systems… the data is very portable (web pages, email messages). Yes, it’s a major pain, but it can be done.
Blog platform providers are a bit different, though. Sure, fundamentally they are just a hosted web server running a content management system (CMS)… but there are specific tools and ways that they work that you get used to and come to rely on. You build up a community of readers and other blogs you read… sure, you can move to another provider, but will they carry over all your links with all the SEO value they have? (not likely)
VOX.COM FAIL
The many users of the Vox.com blogging platform woke up yesterday to discover that their home is shutting down and going away effective September 30th:
On Thursday September 30th, your blog will no longer be available at Vox.com, and you will no longer be able to sign in to Vox.
Poof!
All the content you wrote… gone. Offline. Removed from the online world.
To the credit of SixApart, they have provided a site, closing.vox.com, that has instructions about how to move your blog to TypePad, to WordPress or to Posterous – and how to move your pictures and videos over to Flickr. However, if you read the comments on this post it would seem that all is not happy in Vox land and that the migration is not smooth and painless.
Largely because I am a paying TypePad customer and already had a blogging platform, I never used Vox beyond setting up an experimental page back in 2006 when the service came out. So the impact of the Vox closing to me personally is minimal.
SEO FAIL!
Here’s where I would be worried, though, if I did use Vox more… what is going to happen to the “search value” of all those blog posts that have been written over the years?
All of the links in search engine results to those posts will FAIL.
There was this comment left by SixApart executive Michael Sippey:
If you do move your blog to TypePad, we’ll redirect any requests for URLs on your Vox account to the home page of your new blog on TypePad.
But note the emphasis I added… your old blog posts will NOT redirect to your new blog posts! The links will instead go to the home page of your new blog, leaving visitors to somehow attempt to find the content that was previously linked to.
Way to kill search value. đ
Another user asked this specific question and the response was to put a link on your new home page to the specific post that gets a lot of traffic.
Not scalable – or desirable.
But it is what is is… you are not in control of your own platform. You were locked-in to the tools and systems of the vendor.
The WordPress Option?
If I were to counsel Vox.com bloggers on what to do next, my personal suggestion would be not to migrate to TypePad, or even to Posterous, but rather over to WordPress.com. Why?
BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT LOCKED IN!
With TypePad, you are back using SixApart’s hosted proprietary blogging platform. Sure, it’s essentialy hosted Movable Type, but it has evolved, and you then need to think about where you can host your site on MT. Posterous is a startup and is using whatever they are using… I’m not sure what they’re using, but it’s not clear to me that if THEY went away I’d be able to move my content. (In fairness, I don’t know.)
I do know, though, that WordPress.com uses the free and open source WordPress software – and if you don’t like hosting it at WordPress.com, you can migrate your site to any of a zillion other WordPress hosting providers – or run it on your own server. Odds are that if you use your own domain name on WordPress.com, you should be able to migrate your content from WordPress.com to another WP site with all the URLs intact!
You are in control.
Definitely something to think about when you evaluate any cloud provider – what happens if they go away? Can you move your content?
Best wishes to the folks who had accounts at Vox.com… I do not envy them the task of migration.
Did you have an account at Vox? Which provider did you choose to migrate to?
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
It will be nice if Typepad will store the content in such a manner that it will be easy to determine the Typepad URL corresponding to a Vox URL so redirected people can with minimal effort can get the current URL from old URL found in search results.
In any event, wouldn’t the SEO rankings will be lost eventually since the spiders will not find content under Vox?
I use WordPress primarily, and blogger for a few smaller less important (or with less quality) blog projects. Never tried Typepad, but I don’t have the money to use the service even if I wanted to. I’m happy with WordPress and wouldn’t dream of changing.
PING:
TITLE: The MomsLikeMe.com Debacle and the Need For the Open Internet And To Control Your Content
BLOG NAME: Disruptive Conversations
A ton of online communities of moms are dying this week. After three years, the “MomsLikeMe.com” websites are shutting down on Friday. From the FAQ: All of the MomsLikeMe sites will permanently shut down on Friday, October 14, 2011. At…
PING:
TITLE: What is Your Backup Plan for Your Blog?
BLOG NAME: Disruptive Conversations
What is your backup plan if the platform you use for blogging suddenly… disappears? What if the provider just shuts down one day? with no warning? What if they have a server failure and your blog(s) go offline… and may…
Me, I’d go to self-hosted WordPress in the first place. Of course, I’m just a *little* biased on the subject. But at least when you have your own hosting and domain, you can control any future redirects that might be necessary. (I’m afraid you’re out of luck regarding that Vox.com domain.) Besides, WordPress.com is hopelessly limited by comparison to what you can do with your own WordPress installation. If you’re nervous about installing and upgrading, use a host like Page.ly.
Actually, you can use WordPress.com and direct your domain to your site. I did this for a while before moving to my own host.
I know you can direct your domain to a WordPress.com site. But there are very few other things you can do with it, and while they will redirect to your WordPress.org site for you, there are also limits to that. (And if you had any ads on your previous blog, forget it: they’re not allowed on WordPress.com.)
Iâm one of the many angry Voxers moving to WordPress so that I donât have to even deal with Six Apart anymore. I donât trust them with the way theyâve handled this abrupt closing. Some people have 3-4 years worth of posts and photos that they are trying to get off the site and itâs an absolute pain if you used the privacy settings because photos that were âNeighborhood onlyâ cannot be moved to a new site easily. They should have given us another month..
Fail for sure
Thanks for the best wishes – I’m going to need it. As soon as I heard about the shutdown, I migrated to wordpress AND typepad since I wanted to get everything I could while I could. Right now, my wordpress is completely private because the importer can’t understand Vox’s “Friends” and “Neighbor” settings. It’s not horrible, but it means my wordpress blog is sealed off to but 35 friends from Vox. I’m already on posterous but it doesn’t have privacy. I looked into Xanga – what the heck is Xanga…? Anyway, that’s a little to “hip” for me, so I’m seriously looking at LiveCloud – another platform I’ve NEVER heard of. I think I could live with wordpress or livecloud. I like either so far, but I think you are right – wordpress is going to be the winner long-term. People have already asked how I’ll import my stuff to LiveCloud and honestly – I don’t need to import anything. I don’t have hundreds of links published in the google index that will ever need to have a good link. I just have a few thousand private posts that I like to keep private, so for now, WordPress is holding onto them in a sort of double-secret probation status. I think Six Apart really let us down with this. I would have paid to keep my account. I hope they realize that I wasn’t the only one that would do that.
Aswath, yes, that would be the ideal case… and you would think with TypePad owning both platforms they could figure out some way to do that. However, for whatever reason they are not.
Regarding the SEO rankings, if TypePad were to do a “301 Redirect” (Moved Permanently) to the new URL the search rankings *should* transfer across to the new URLs. This is the process Google itself recommends:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633
Thanks for the comment.
Sallie, thanks for commenting and yes, owning your own domain is definitely a key to migrating your blog to a new host. Like Michael Graves, I have mapped my own domain to a WordPress.com site (for a cost of ~$10/year), primarily for experimentation.
Obviously Vox.com users are out of luck on that one since Vox.com didn’t allow domain mapping (that I was ever aware of).
Yes, WordPress.com is limited versus your own private install of the WordPress software, but it probably is “good enough” to many people who are just starting out or looking for very simple solutions (which was the target market for Vox.com).
Yes, I could see that if you were using it for a private site like that, none of the new options are very helpful. It’s almost like you need to bring it into Facebook with a “Friends Only” attribute on each post. However, I’m not entirely sure any of us can trust Facebook, either!
Best wishes with whatever you end up doing.
DeWitte, Interesting to hear of your investigations. One other site you might want to consider is LiveJournal:
http://www.livejournal.com/
“LJ” does have the kind of privacy that you are talking about with posts only being visible to friends. Ironically, it was owned by SixApart from 2005 until the end of 2007 when it was sold off to a Russian consortium. I used LJ as my primarily blog site from probably 2004 to 2006 and still have an account there: http://dyork.livejournal.com/
I stopped using LiveJournal as my main writing home primarily because I did not really want the “community” aspect of LJ that it sounds like you want. I wanted to be publishing more publicly and wanting additional services that were not then available at LJ.
Anyway, it might be an option for you and others. (Of course, that depends how comfortable you are with LJ’s current owners… more info at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal )