Posterous will turn off on April 30

crap.

The handwriting was on the wall for this when Posterous built data export: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/28/twitter-own-postero...

I do give them a lot of credit for providing a means to export data (albeit a somewhat clunky one), because way too many services simply shut down without providing a reasonable way to get your data out.

Will also be interesting to see what the "key initiatives" that Posterous will be doing at Twitter are: http://blog.twitter.com/2012/03/welcoming-posterous-team-to-...

Wordpress.

That might sound obvious, but it works and it's easy to setup. I left Posterous after they launched Spaces and went back to hosting my own Wordpress install. I host about 20 low traffic sites on a single Bluehost.com shared server that costs under $100 per year. Never had any issues. One click Wordpress install via SimpleScripts. It really doesn't get any easier.

To be totally honest, I'm surprised it's taken this long.

Everyone knew a year ago when they were acquihired that Posterous would be discontinued. Why do I say this? Well, Twitter's bread and butter is in 140 characters, if they wanted to look at branching out into micro-blogging they wouldn't need to acquire a company, of whom the majority of their customers already use Twitter. (It was borderline a zero-value gain for Twitter if you take out Posterous' talent)

As it stands now, Tumblr clearly won (Although there has been a few emerging startups of insignificant size. Soup.io is one that springs to mind that is currently in an accelerator). If you are looking for hosted solutions for your startup's blog (or you are at all technical), I'd genuinely think about using GitHub. Start to pull your posts from Posterous and use a static content generator. Jekyll / Punch / Middleman / Hyde / Korma / nanonc / Frank + (any of the other 10 static generators)..

The operative point from using services that generate static content is that you are always in control of your plain-text content. Just push your new post and GitHub will handle your site. If you are worried about traffic on your site or extended build periods (I believe GH does rate limit static sites, and as a comment below mentions, on infrequent occasions builds can take upwards of several hours) then you can still use any other solution... Push to Amazon S3 and proxy through Cloudfront, then you will have probably one of the fastest, geographically distributed blogs on the internet.

This was always happening... Especially when you consider that for the last 12 months I haven't seen a single new feature since they were acquired. I've logged in, see the same "Posterous has been acquired" header for the last 12 months.

Move on, and safeguard your future content.

As a product I was always impressed by the just email, no setup approach.

With the current trend towards people posting one-off or irregular essays instead of full-featured blogs, it seems as if they veered away from the simple email posting route too soon.

What was once an interesting approach to blogging was pivoted into a samey metaservice with nothing notable for me.