The Dangers of Online Services

This week was a bad week for online blogging services. First the blogging service JournalSpace, with hundreds of users, just, well, died, because they didn't have a proper backup. Today, the blogging service SoapBlox, which was used by many progressive political bloggers, such as Pam's House Blend, was hacked, and it is currently unclear how many sites have survived, and what will happen to them.

These are two fairly small, fairly low-profile services (although SoapBlox is considered an extremely important part of the progressive blogosphere.) They hosted a small percentage of the blogs out there (in comparison to, say, TypePad or Blogger.) However, this is, of course, devastating to those who had their blogs there.

Lessons to learn:

• Always have your own backup of your data/content
  
• Remember when setting up a website or blog that if you use a service, the data is not in your hands, but in someone elses
• Always have a disaster recovery plan