a cautionary tale

Anyone remember Stikipad, the free, hosted wiki solution? Yeah, I did too. Well, guess what? They upped and disappeared.

Yes, this probably happens in the land of web 2.0 all the time, but here’s the rub: the Emerging Technologies Group at MPOW used Stikipad as our documentation wiki and I did that thing I always warn people not to do when using free online tools: I didn’t back things up. It looked like things were going downhill for them some time ago, but as it happens, I didn’t have need to check out old meeting minutes for months, and when I tried to access them recently, I was rudely confronted with a DNS error page. And, no, I didn’t receive a single heads-up message from them warning of their imminent closure.

So, the moral of the story? Back. Things. Up.

Updated later: thanks to David for pointing out that Stikipad seems to be back (if you’re still seeing the DNS error, give it a bit to propagate). Guess who’s moving her data?

Absolutely. This is the inherent danger with relying on entirely web-based information storage services. And with many of these start-ups being entirely free, they owe nothing to the user (including fair warning, unfortunately).

Too bad you had to remember the moral the hard way!

Looks like the site is back up now. I did note they have spam links across the bottom, which I presume they were paid for placing.

Weird to let it atrophy away like it has. If it were cashflow issues, why are they still hosting it at all?

I agree with you, past time to bail while you can still get your content out.

@andrew Yeah. What’s that saying about eating your own dog food?

@David I’m still getting the DNS error, but maybe them being back just hasn’t propagated…? If I can get back in, it will be the quickest in & out with my data ever!

I’m glad you’ll be able to get your content off. I used stikipad ages ago and I had the feeling then that they may not last (though I always liked their interface). This is a perfect post as my social software class goes into the final weeks on marketing and best practices.

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