| > 1. why did you get out of the file host business or why were you glad to? Handling abuse complaints, wrangling bandwidth spikes, etc. ended up taking way more time than I wanted to give to it. This was before a lot of the modern easily-scalable hosting services were around, so it's not like I could just automagically spin up new instances. So basically, I ran out of time in my day, and since I already had a good day job I figured "fuck it" and sold out. I maaaaaybe could've gone full time with it, but it would have been really hard and I would have been competing against some already well-established players. I didn't have much presence outside a particular community, and growing it into a general-purpose thing would've probably killed the "one of us" karma that let me get popular in the first place... so... yeah, not a good plan. > 2. how did you get out of it? sold, fizzled, etc.. Sold. The party that bought it promptly ran it into the ground in a rather impressively stupid series of decisions, and it was gone within a year. Oh well. Not my problem. I got a decent payout, which -- being younger and stupid -- I promptly blew. So basically in the end all I got was a year or two of really fun living. :) I'm actually OK with that. It didn't start as more than just a way to serve a specific community's needs, it blew up in popularity and as a result I got some cool experience and some spending money out of it. Seems like a successful project in retrospect. |
"Easily scalable" only works to a point, then it quickly becomes expensive unless you create a solution tailored specifically for your problems, at which point you're negating the "easily" part again.