Why I Shut Down Ruralgay.com
Hi,
I feel I owe a longer explanation about why I'm shutting
down Ruralgay.com to those of you who have been longtime, loyal supporters
of this site.
Ruralgay.com started out in 1996-97 as a glorified home page. I was just
hoping to find other gay folks who lived in the country or wanted to live
in the country. As more and more folks found Ruralgay.com, I added features.
Personal ads, forums, chat, the Country Store, resources and more. It
was relatively easy to do — chat software, for example, only cost
a few hundred bucks, and there were plenty of web hosts wiling to host
it on shared servers cheap. There also weren't lots of online security
concernsThe dot.com bubble burst, and all those software vendors and web
hosts had to figure out how to make a profit. Those purveyors of relatively
cheap chat and bulletin board software dished the people-to-people community
building market and went 'corporate'. When I first purchased Chatspace,
the chat server that Ruralgay.com uses, it cost me $495. A year later,
the upgrade set me back $995. And today, if I upgraded to their latest
(and most secure) version, I'm looking at about $3,000.
Those cheap webhosts offering online community features
have gone the way of the Edsel. In order to keep Ruralgay running with
databases and chat software, I had to have my own server, which I got
about 4 years ago. In those 4 years, the server has been seriously hacked
3 times. Even with backups, it take a day or more to rebuild the server
and get it back online.
The security issues of maintaining a server — especially
one with open chat software — are immense. Keeping up with all the
patches and fixes could practically be a full time job.Beyond security,
the technical and programming issues have also grown. Ruralgay.com, frankly,
needs to be completely reprogrammed to keep up with the online community
features of Yahoo or gay.com — companies with deep pockets and lots
of programming muscle.Most small, online community sites have shut down
in the past few years. All of these sites, like Ruralgay, have been run
by a single webmaster, and its just impossible to keep up.
When you run a small site, you always have to be available
— in case there's a server problem, or user issues. I haven't taken
a vacation in years without lugging a laptop and making sure I'd have
an internet connection. My biggest fear is that I'd be in Central America,
and the hard disk on the server in Syracuse would die. Ruralgay.com is
sort of like having a dog, but you can't put it in a kennel when you go
away.One question sure to arise is "Did I think about turning it
over to someone else to run, or to get help to run it?" The answer
is "Yes". I've spoken with a few people over the past few months
about options to transfer the site. The economics don't work — keeping
the site running would be a labor of love, not money. It does require
a fairly high level of technical expertise, as well as someone with the
skills and money to make Ruralgay.com a pretty bullet-proof site, with
hardware firewalls and more robust security firewalls.So, in the end,
I realized I was swimming against an incoming tide. Small community sites
just aren't that viable any longer. So rather than try to keep this little
city going with band aids and duct tape, the most viable option is to
become a 'neighborhood' of a larger city (Yahoo Groups) with the infrastructure
to support us.
Thank you all for your support, and understanding of this
decision.
David