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Sure, sorry about that.
@prae5 account recreated see email. Any issues PM.
OVH - SoYouStart. Perfect for the server. You'd just need a CDN if you wanted that.
Why not wait for @ElliotJ to answer on this thread
http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/21374/gatsby-im-discontinued
everyone just seems to copy something he already was running, alot of people offered resources in that thread to help him out so he might picks it up again.
MIA? This entire thread is less than 24 hours old. Seems a bit premature.
I'm working on a similar service, testing it on a local vm right now, going live sometime this week.
Sorry, misread. Thought you said raindog was MIA. My bad. footinmouth.jpg
Apologies for this late response. I haven't been available to really post on here recently, but I'll try to summarise the demise of Gatsby.
Essentially I'm a student in the UK, and I'm 4 months away from the exams which will determine which university I'll be attending next year.
Gatsby was funded by my part time job however due to a greater need to knuckle down and study, I've had to cut hours dramatically.
It's not a decision I've wanted to make - I've spent a lot of time working on Gatsby, so it's a bit crap having to let it die.
I have received emails regarding 'acquiring' Gatsby, however I honestly do not see the appeal. The service never made a penny, and was costing me close to £100/month, not including the hours every week spent on maintaining it. In regards to 'transferring' ownership, I'm unsure whether it would be ethical, considering the amount of personal data is on the network.
A premium version was in the works, however was never launched due to the lack of time I could devote to paying customers.
I'd like to apologise again to the community members who've been using Gatsby. I understand losing your data isn't precisely the greatest thing to happen, however due to the awkward situation I'm currently in, a rapid shutdown was my only real option.
I'm not too comfortable going into any more detail concerning my personal affairs on here, however I'll try to answer any questions you have.
In regards to 'recreating' Gatsby, it's not that difficult at all. It's just a WordPress Multisite install with most static assets offloaded onto a CDN with a redis cache to speed up page delivery. Combine that with a wildcard DNS record and you're ready to go.
The only difficulty is preparing to scale, which I admittedly didn't do too gracefully.
The final setup consisted of using three Online.net 30EUR servers. The first dedicated to nginx/php/redis, another dedicated to MySQL, and the third for storage - A really messy SSHFS solution.
I did create a plugin that allowed users to upload their content (audio/video/images) to Amazon S3 (or any other file store using a similar API) however due to the projected costs it was deemed unfeasible.
DDoSes happened fairly rarely. From experience it wasn't much to worry about.
I had initially had the entire service behind CloudFlare however there were a couple issues; CloudFlare didn't particularly like it when you had more than a couple thousand records on a free account, and there was a noticeable delay waiting for the records to create - Users want things fast, so using this method meant that over 90% of blogs created during that period were never used.
Plugins were kept to a minimum - there were only about 5 at any time. The WordPress base install is pretty good if you just want the basics. If you desperately needed something extravagant, Gatsby probably wasn't for you. The less you have installed, the less chance one goes rogue. I also manually updated each one.
Themes were a pain the ass. You'd get people asking them to upload a themes they've 'purchased' all the time. More often than not, these were pirated and had backdoors in them, not a great plan.
I've realised I'm rambling a little bit, but there's nothing stopping anyone from creating a very similar service. I'm also happy to offer any advice publicly (for the benefit of others) for getting one started.
@ElliotJ - if you want to bring it back to life then we'll provide you the servers to do it. PM me a list of what you need and I'll talk to one of our directors tomorrow.
What's wrong with this?
http://wordpress.com/