Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 26 posts

Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant

#11

Post by ibsulon »

tweety wrote: post #6

Besides 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?

Sometimes, it just seems like the universe is trying to send us a message. Take that in a spiritual way if you want, or take it in the sense that a cataclysmic (relatively speaking) forces us to reevaluate our priorities.

Certainly, if this happened to me and I came to that decision, I'd put up a forum for everyone so that they could engage and figure out post-startup plans. But that's me.

Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant

#12

Post by briansmith »

"...We have retained the professional 'Gold Support Service' of MySQL..."

It is interesting that if MySQL had built-in measures to prevent this kind of disaster, MySQL would have never got any money from them.

That is the problem I see with commercial FOSS: if your product installs easily, runs perfectly, and is easy to use, there is no way to make money.

Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant

#14

Post by wvenable »

briansmith wrote: post #12

"...We have retained the professional 'Gold Support Service' of MySQL..." It is interesting that if MySQL had built-in measures to prevent this kind of disaster, MySQL would have never got any money from them. That is the problem I see with commercial FOSS: if your product installs easily, runs perfectly, and is easy to use, there is no way to make money.

MySQL does have built-in measures to prevent this kind of disaster! They should have enabled binary logging and use that to make low impact backups. They also could have used replication (also built in) to avoid all these problems and have a hot backup.

The only reason they retained the 'Gold Support Service' is because their own database administrators obviously had no idea what they were doing or how to use the software correctly.

There are always companies that will make use of commercial support for FOSS but MySQL will probably never make any money from me.

Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant

#15

Post by bdr »

gustaf wrote: post #13

This sucks. When I first heard about CouchSurfing i wrote it down on my list of "Ideas that will change the world". Maybe someone can make a new version and integrate it with Facebook?

The story is from 2006. CouchSurfing is alive and well. :)

Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant

#17

Post by nraynaud »

how do you backup and recover your stuff ?

I can't find any prepackaged thing on the web. I'd like to address 2 needs : disaster recovery and point in time recovery.

For now I only dump the database from time to time, but it's far from a real solution, if I loose my whole server it would take quite some time to get its configuration back on track.

Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant

#18

Post by chmac »

GavinB wrote: post #10
sh1mmer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

CouchSurfing International Inc was registered as a non-profit and is now a charity.

Knowing a bit about it (having been a volunteer for the org) I think the crash was extremely badly handled. For better or worse, many people were relying on the service to find places to stay, connect with people in foreign cities, and so on. Leaving those people high and dry is bad karma. Likewise, users should be encouraged to make "backups" in the form of phone nos, email addresses, etc if the reliability of the site can't be guaranteed.

I think the problem is a classic one in technology. The geeks at the helm are over confident. Their self belief clouds their judgement with regards to backups, failure planning, and so on.

Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant

#19

Post by shafqat »

nraynaud wrote: post #17

how do you backup and recover your stuff ? I can't find any prepackaged thing on the web. I'd like to address 2 needs : disaster recovery and point in time recovery. For now I only dump the database from time to time, but it's far from a real solution, if I loose my whole server it would take quite some time to get its configuration back on track.

I'd love to get people's thoughts on this as well. What are the best ways to automatically back up your DB.

Re: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant

#20

Post by dmpayton »

nraynaud wrote: post #17

how do you backup and recover your stuff ? I can't find any prepackaged thing on the web. I'd like to address 2 needs : disaster recovery and point in time recovery. For now I only dump the database from time to time, but it's far from a real solution, if I loose my whole server it would take quite some time to get its configuration back on track.

If it's a *nix system, why not setup a cron job to do it for you? I have a Python script in /etc/cron.daily that performs a mysql-dump, tars it, and uploads it to S3.

For total completeness and peace-of-mind, you could have the script add anything else you need backed up, like your projects or public_html directories, configuration files, etc.

Post reply on HN