Blogetery Blog Hosting Site Closes Down

On July 9th, 2010, the Blogetery blog hosting company took down its website with no warning. The company reportedly hosted 73,000 blogs. These also disappeared.

Blogetery was hosted by BurstNet, which took down the site against the wishes of its webmaster,Alexander Yusupov. Blogerty made a brief reappearance a few years later, but quickly fell to disuse and was completely shuttered shortly thereafter.

Why Did Blogetery Close?

Copyright infringement was suspected to be the cause of the closure, but Yusupov disputed this.

Eventually,BurstNet’s CTO Joe Marr went on the record saying that a Blogetery user had posted terrorist material that was noted by the FBI.

As a result, 73,000 bloggers lost their work.

What Mistakes Did Blogetery Make?

As a website owner, Alexander Yusupov could arguably have done more when the crisis hit. It took himthree days to respond, so he perhaps wasn’tmonitoring the service adequately.

According tostatements made by BurstNet, Blogerty was taken down for four days the previous April when Yusupov failed to address warnings regarding inappropriate content. The site’s history of warnings and slow response appears to have played a part in its final closure.

Yusupov did not have complete backups for his site, so he was not able to restore the content with another host. BurstNet did not offer backups by default.

How Can You Protect Your Blog?

Your blog could be deleted for many different reasons: human error (including yours), a hardware failure, TOS violations and so forth.

This is particularly true of you’re using an online blogging application, as opposed to one you host yourself. In the case of Blogerty, 73,000 users lost their content because of one user’s offensive material.

If you have an active blog, or you’re thinking about starting one, consider these suggestions:

Host Your Blog in a Safer Place

If you’re looking for a site to host your blog, chances are you have already considered WordPress or Blogger. There are several other online blogging sites available, but these two offer some significant advantages. They both have proven track records for support and reliability, so the chances of either of them disappearing tomorrow are enormously slim. There are also plenty of third-party tools available to set up your own, automated backups.

This isn’t to say there aren’t some other fantastic blogging programs available, and another service may well fit your needs or niche more appropriately. If you do go with another blogging service, make sure there is some option for setting up automated backups, either through the platform a third party.

Host It Yourself

Of course, if you want to guarantee to security and longevity of your blog, skip the online services altogether and host it on your own site.

Several free blogging platforms exist, including the major CMS applications,WordPress,Joomla,Drupal. All of these can be used to set up your own website and blog. Or if you’re looking for something to exclusively manage your blog, consider a program likeBlogEngine.Net,FlatPress, orb2evolution.

There are several advantages to a self-hosted blog. First, you’re in complete control. Yes, your host can always pull the plug if you violate their content guidelines, but that shouldn’t matter if you’re taking the right precautions. Most hosts offer some sort of backup solution through their control panel. Make sure you’re using it.

Even if your host performs regular backups, those aren’t guaranteed. Create your own regular backups, and make sure they save somewhere other than your server. That way, even if your host shuts you down, you can be back up and running with a new host in no time. Of course, if this does happen, you should look over your content and get rid of the offending material before the next host kicks you off too.

If you’re not comfortable setting up backups at the server level, many self-hosted blogging programs, including WordPress, have add-ons you can install that will set up automatic backups for you. Most services will back up all of your content to a cloud storage site, such as Dropbox. If your cloud storage is also set to synced with your computer, that means your blog will be stored in 3 separate locations: on your server, in the cloud, and on your home computer.

Respond to Complaints in a Timely Manner

Hopefully, you won’t ever receive a complaint, but if you do, respond to them immediately. Venting your frustrations on a forum won’t fix the problem or get your site back up and running.

If you ignore your host’s warnings, you shouldn’t be surprised when your blog gets taken down. It may not be tomorrow. It may not even be for the same reason. If you have a bad history with your host, they’ll consider that the next time an issue arises.

Backup. Backup. Backup.

If you take nothing else out of the Blogetery situation, let it be this: take your own backups.

There are plenty of backup options available to bloggers. It pays to invest a little money and time. Hopefully, you’ll never need to use your backup file but, if you do, you’ll be very glad it’s there.

Claire Broadley

Claire is a freelance writer. She works with us through Red Robot Media, which she runs along with her associate Mathew Dixon. In addition, Claire is an accomplished musician who has toured the world with her band Printed Circuit. She lives in the United Kingdom.