You would like to avoid moving your blog to a new platform as far as being satisfied with the one you are currently using.
However, your blog platform provider may suddenly shut down its service due to their financial reasons or policy changes. When moving, in order to prevent disengaging your fans, you are truly recommended to set up a new blog on a new platform ASAP, and to announce the new site’s address on your current site.
Most of blog platform providers, which plan to suspend their services, will give you a period and special measures of transition in advance, by bringing you the prior notice and the features enabling to dump your previous blog posts and to carry them to another blog platforms.
But if your blog provider shuts your new post without giving you a chance to announce the prior notice to your readers, how can you recover the user engagement to your blog thereafter?
More than a month has passed since Doblog[J] suspended its service due to technical difficulties. Doblog is a free blog platform service provided by NTT Data, which is Japan’s top system integration company and also known for building and maintaining the country’s many mission-critical systems such as inter-bank networks and government-related systems.
According to the Doblog operations, the service suspension was caused by accidental technical difficulties of hard disk crashes occured on both the primary and the standby database servers simultaneously.
Regarding the messages posted since the platform’s launch in 2003 until last August, they succeeded to recover the data from back up media, but those posted during the last six months are still in recovering process. For technical reasons, neither new message post nor track back is yet available.
For those who had previously their blogs on Doblog and have no way to inform the spectators of their new blog addresses, an anonymous blogger voluntarily launch a website to give them a chance to announce where they moved to, which is named “a refugee camp for ex-Dobloggers[J]“.
As of this writing at the end of March, NTT Data has made no official statement to clarify whether they get the service back to normal operation or give it up. Even if the platform is completely recovered on technical basis, it will be difficult to continue the service in terms of user engagement.
Let us keep in mind the adage to “be prepared and have no regrets”.
Now it reminds me of wondering how the data backup for Asiajin goes through.
(The picture above shows you the top page of Doblog, which apologizes any inconvnience it may cause.)
(The Picture above shows you the top page of “Refugee Camp for Ex-Dobloggers”.)
Masaru IKEDA
Thanks Masaru. Arai and I receiving the backed-up data periodically so Asiajin should be fine (fingers crossed).
NTT Data is a pretty huge company so this might not mean their mission critical section holds the similar risk, and probably Doblog is not a top-10 blog platform so there are not many poor bloggers, but it is anyway embarrassing incident.
It was a relief to hear your answer. (Asiajin’s data back-up)
Unfortunately I couldn’t find any survey about the top 10 blog platforms, but Doblog should be out of it exactly as you mentioned.
NTT Data is now so aggressive to acquire IT companies as to get in the world’s top five system integrators.