AOL Meltdown?
Wow, I'm really glad I moved my website back in February. I have kept a few files on my aol server since that time, mostly pages with forwarding code to direct folks with old links to the new site... never a bad idea when your website has been at the same URL for 13 years... so I went to look at one of those files today, and it was gone! It had been replaced by a letter from AOL, and I kid you not, this is the letter I found in its place, verbatim:
Dear AOL Hometown User,
We're sorry to inform you that as of Oct. 31, 2008, AOL® Hometown was shut down permanently. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Sincerely,
The AOL Hometown Team
Naturally, this posting was followed by several comments from irate customers wanting to know where their website went and how to get their files back so they could move them to a new hosting account. Yes, that's right... AOL didn't tell any of their customers they were shutting it down until it had already happened, so all of their customers lost all of their data! Now the smart ones, like me, will have their html files backed up on at least one home computer, but there is quite a handful that are cursing AOL because they have to rewrite their websites from scratch!
Upon further pondering, this makes me wonder if my email address is in jeopardy, too. This would not be good. My website users have had nearly a year to find my new website with direction from the old URL, but a similar obliteration of my email account with no time to update the world (i.e. friends, clients, newsletters, creditors, other online accounts, etc.) would be quite frustrating, indeed. Hmmm.... it might be time to consider moving my email address to ellieseligmann.com, too.
Dear AOL Hometown User,
We're sorry to inform you that as of Oct. 31, 2008, AOL® Hometown was shut down permanently. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Sincerely,
The AOL Hometown Team
Naturally, this posting was followed by several comments from irate customers wanting to know where their website went and how to get their files back so they could move them to a new hosting account. Yes, that's right... AOL didn't tell any of their customers they were shutting it down until it had already happened, so all of their customers lost all of their data! Now the smart ones, like me, will have their html files backed up on at least one home computer, but there is quite a handful that are cursing AOL because they have to rewrite their websites from scratch!
Upon further pondering, this makes me wonder if my email address is in jeopardy, too. This would not be good. My website users have had nearly a year to find my new website with direction from the old URL, but a similar obliteration of my email account with no time to update the world (i.e. friends, clients, newsletters, creditors, other online accounts, etc.) would be quite frustrating, indeed. Hmmm.... it might be time to consider moving my email address to ellieseligmann.com, too.
posted by DenverSop @ 3:04 AM
1 Comments:
At 1/15/2009 7:54 AM,
Anonymous said…
I'd heard about that situation. Good move. As for the email address, they'd be breaching a whole bunch of paid contracts to simply shut off email like that, whereas, with the website hosting, they were just shutting off a service that I think they considered a free add-on to what had already been paid. That explanation doesn't excuse their actions morally, although I think they just squeak by legally on it.
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