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Wednesday, 25 April 2012

FortuneCity Pulls The Plug On Free Hosting

Another dinosaur from the beginning days of the Internet has just announced that they would stop offering free hosting services. The company began as a free web hosting service in the late 90s, similar to what services such as WordPress.com is offering users now. Users could join districts in the virtual city where they would create their websites in. This was very similar to what GeoCities started to offer two years earlier.

If you are now visiting the FortuneCity website you are greeted with the following text:

Dear FortuneCity Customers,
We’ve enjoyed providing free hosting the past twelve years, but due to rising costs it is no longer feasible for us to provide the free service. As a result, your free website will no longer resolve as of April 30th, 2012.
You can log into your website before April 30th to retrieve your files. If you are looking for a website hosting provider, transfer your files to Dotster hosting. FortuneCity customers can get 80% off a new Dotster hosting plan by using coupon code FORTUNE80 at checkout.

The announcement basically states that FortuneCity will close all free accounts as of April 30, 2012. From that day on, free websites will no longer be accessible on the Internet. The reason given are increased costs to host the free service, which basically means that the ad revenue is not enough to keep offering the service. Customers with free accounts can log into their websites until that day to export their files to their local computer or the hosting company Dotster (if they get a paid account there).

fortunecity

New users who try to sign up for a free website will also be directed to the announcement on the front page. It appears as if FortuneCity will continue to offer paid hosting accounts and websites, and that only the free accounts are removed from the service.

To be honest, I have not seen a FortuneCity website in a long time. The same was true when Geocities was still operational. The biggest problem that free Fortunecity users face is that they cannot redirect their original site to a new one, which in turn means that they will lose all of the traffic and links that point to their free site.

What’s your take on the announcement?

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Saturday March 24, 2012 -
Tags:internet

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Monday, 26 March 2012

Scroogle Founder Pulls The Plug, Closes Website

Scroogle was one of the sites that came up occasionally here on Ghacks as an alternative to Google Search. It basically provided access to Google Search results through a proxy to protect the privacy of its users. In this regard, it was more of a Google proxy than a search engine. Daniel Brandt, the creator of Scroogle, established the service in April 2003, and it has ever since been available online. Things turned for the worse in recent years when Google started to block – and unblock – the search engine from accessing its servers.

Many users suspected foul play here, while Google denied the allegations and stated that automated spam protection scripts were responsible for the blocking. That was unfortunate but a situation that most Scroogle users were willing to live with.

In February 2012, things started to heat up once again when Google started to block the service’s access to their servers more regularly. That hurt the service considerably and made it less usable than before.

Scroogle servers on top of that were harassed by DDoS (denial of service) attacks that started back in December. Daniel Brandt decided to pull the plug on Scroogle, and all other domain names he owned, as of yesterday. Domains were not only taken offline content wise, but also in the domain name system (DNS) to protect the server providers from further DDoS attacks on their infrastructure.

Users who try to access the Scroogle website now will receive a site not found error. The other domain names that were taken down are: namebase.org, google-watch.org, cia-on-campus.org, and book-grab.com.

Brandt told BetaBeat that he would have had to close down Scroogle even without the DDoS attacks due to Google’s traffic throttling.

With Scroogle being taken off the grid, where should privacy valuing users go to for their searches now? The two search engines that come to mind are DuckDuckGo or Startpage.com

Enjoyed the article?: Then sign-up for our free newsletter or RSS feed to kick off your day with the latest technology news and tips, or share the article with your friends and contacts on Facebook or Twitter. Popular Bittorrent Website BTJunkie Closes Its Doors
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Twitter Founder Steps Down as CEO About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday February 22, 2012 -
Tags:google search

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Sunday, 29 January 2012

Grooveshark Pulls Out Of Germany

Grooveshark’s ride to popularity has abruptly ended, at least in Germany. German users trying to access the website of the popular music streaming service Grooveshark are now greeted with an informational page telling them that the service has ended its operation in the country. According to the information, cost of operation reached a level in Germany that did not allow the company to continue offering their streaming music service.

You probably think that bandwidth and storage costs have fueled that decision, but that’s far away from the truth. It seems that the German performance rights organization GEMA, the bane of all music on the Internet, has once again had its hand in play. The organization is for instance the reason that German users are not able to watch many music videos that are posted on YouTube.

GEMA in 2009 asked Google to pay $0,013 per song played on YouTube. Google declined back then and as a result, German users cannot watch the majority of music videos on YouTube.

Grooveshark likely faced a similar decision, and like Google, Grooveshark decided to pull out of the country instead.

grooveshark germany

A GEMA mail address is listed on the page for users to direct their complaints to. It may be more fruitful on the other hand to direct complaints directly to politicans and not the GEMA.

Grooveshark recommends the German Simfy service as an alternative. And while that service looks like a great alternative on first glance, it needs to be noted that free users (with an account) only get five hours of free music per month. Users who would like to listen to more music need to switch to the Premium account which sets them back €4.99 each month.

Existing Grooveshark users can export their music from the service. A link is provided in the announcement.

The mobile clients are currently still working. It will however only be a matter of time until they will be shut down as well. (via Caschy)

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