CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant
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Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant
#2Ran into this old story on TC, just reinforced the point that disaster recovery is not just about careful planning but also about experience. Make sure you periodically, test your backup disaster recovery plan too.
Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant
#3thank god couchsurfing is back and better than before---i would be dead in europe and south america without it
Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant
#4More info from the source.
http://www.couchsurfing.com/crash_page.html
Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant
#5Awesome historical lesson. You will know you have built something of value when it becomes much, much bigger than you.
Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant
#6Besides the tragic (or incompetent?) tech failures, what do folks here think about the founder initially just calling it quits on the community?
Having followed this particular crash-recovery saga unfold and being involved with web 2.0 otherwise, it would be interesting to hear a few thoughts over this: what's the responsibility of the platform provider towards their possibly very engaged community - or is there any?
Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant
#7Today, at over half a million members with CS2.0, they're more stable, and doing things like using AWS for static picture serving needs. And there are many more people working on keeping it up and running these days :)
Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant
#8Besides the tragic (or incompetent?) tech failures, what do folks here think about the founder initially just calling it quits on the community? Having followed this particular crash-recovery saga unfold and being involved with web 2.0 otherwise, it would be interesting to hear a few thoughts over this: what's the responsibility of the platform provider towards their possibly very engaged community - or is there any?
I think it's a difficult dilemma, but ultimately the founders don't owe the community unless people were paying for a service. Firstly, without the founder there would be no community, secondly, their work created and made the community possible. They have to be responsible to themselves, and that might mean taking a break.
If the community wants to remain a community then normally someone else will step up, that's the power of community, it's bigger than just a web site. In the case of couch surfing v2 seems to be going strong.
Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant
#9I wonder about the DBAs they hired. It would be interesting to hear about some hiring lessons based on this.
At some point you have to be able to trust people, and unless you are already an expert in that area how do you really know?
Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant
#10Besides the tragic (or incompetent?) tech failures, what do folks here think about the founder initially just calling it quits on the community? Having followed this particular crash-recovery saga unfold and being involved with web 2.0 otherwise, it would be interesting to hear a few thoughts over this: what's the responsibility of the platform provider towards their possibly very engaged community - or is there any?
I think it's a difficult dilemma, but ultimately the founders don't owe the community unless people were paying for a service. Firstly, without the founder there would be no community, secondly, their work created and made the community possible. They have to be responsible to themselves, and that might mean taking a break. If the community wants to remain a community then normally someone else will step up, that's t…
I would hope the founder of a company with a successful community would at least try to pass on the name and membership to community members or other entrepreneurs who would try to continue the community. I'm sure there are plenty of entrepreneurs and businesses who would have been happy to get nothing but the domain name and member list to try to start a new couchsurfing (though it appears that the service came back just fine on its own).