Host Minecraft on Shard Gaming? Grab your data RIGHT NOW before it goes completely titsup Game-server hosting biz Shard Gaming has abruptly shut down, irritating punters who depended on the service and highlighting the risks of off-premises systems. The company specialized in dedicated kit for gamers eager to run multiplayer servers for Minecraft, Day of Defeat, Garry's Mod, and others. It was formerly known as " …
Not everybody does.
As Clouds come and go that'll just condition the market into not trusting clouds in general. For instance, I doubt that the former Shard customers are terribly enthusiastic about the whole idea anymore.
It'll also probably end up with there being just a few clouds, perhaps Amazon, Google, maybe Apple & MS. Apple have too much of a reputation for closing cloud services, MS are late to the party.
The really scary thing is that Google are just a couple of privacy law changes away from having no business model at all. If they ever lose the right to sniff through customer data then the whole business model for their cloud services vanishes, as will their cloud. Given the court cases starting up in the US its not so hard to imagine this happening. So, would you take the risk of irrevocably basing your whole corporate IT around Google Apps if you thought you might wake up one morning to discover its not there anymore?
The way I see it is that for clouds to survive in the long run they're going to have to properly inter-operate properly. A couple of big failures and everyone will decide its safer to do it themselves with their own hardware. That's what I do,
My guess is that someone absconded with the company's bankroll, or other shenanigans.
Yet another valid reason why putting all your stuff with one hosting provider (or the absolute cheapest) is not the best idea in the world.
*wanders off to start an FTP backup of his hosted sites, just in case*
"Cheap hosting is cheap "
Sorry... this an ironic statement considering the following.
The performance of the KVM VDS we purchased from Shard blew MinecraftProhosting and Fragnet out of the water.
Neither was it cheap in terms of cash.
The problem has not been their quality of service. The problem is that they shut their doors in an extremely unprofessional manner after taking money for some pretty decent service. There was no sign of impending doom, and their collocation provider denies the claim that they were shut off.
"Are you surprised? Looks like they've been on a rocky path for some time"
And then in an attempt to support your statement that the handwriting should have been visible on the wall "for some time" you post a link to a thread which was stated... today.
People who can't bother to consider whether they have something important to say, should be led to understand that they probably have nothing important to say.
The problem is that people who lack the skills necessary to make intelligent comments, are lacking in exactly those skills that would inform them that they have nothing intelligent to say.
We are now eight day on from the Shard collapse and there is still no word from Co-Location about our data, despite being at the head of the queue with our query.
Also, we are having trouble with our new "host" where upload speeds TO the cloud seem fine, but getting our backups off the box seem (this is how initial testing looks) to be throttled.
If I didn't have such crappy internet service from PlusNet (read BT - I'm another of those in the sticks who won't get upgraded 'till the 22nd century ... and if then) I would run the game server at home ... but this is pathetic.
This is at the cheap end of the market ... but I think that these experiences should be on the mind of any business which is considering putting its data or services in the cloud. When it goes wrong, it can go catastrophically wrong ... and it is all outside your control.
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